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Squash Dish
5 MEDIUM-SIZED ONIONS I NO. 3 CAN TOMATOES Dice bacon and fry it crisp. Remove from pan to fry onions until transparent. Add the corn, tomatoes, and bacon. Cook at least fifteen minutes. Slow cooking for a longer time improves the flavor. Because of the use of corn, this is a popular dish for "Indian" meals. 1/2 POUND BACON 2 POUNDS LEAN MEAT (LEFT OVER OR FRESH LAMB OR BEEF)
A one-pan camp dish built on bacon fat, onions, corn and tomatoes, with meat stretched from whatever was left over. The ingredient list as printed does not fully match the method, so read both before shopping.
- The No. 3 canA No. 3 tin held roughly 4 cups, about 32 ounces or a quart. Two standard 14.5-oz cans of tomatoes with their juice is the closest modern equivalent.
- Corn quantity is missingThe method calls for "the corn" but no amount appears in the ingredients. For the scale implied by five onions and a No. 3 can of tomatoes, expect somewhere in the range of 4 cups of kernels, but the original does not say.
- The meat is never mentioned againTwo pounds of lean lamb or beef is listed and then dropped from the instructions. Leftover cooked meat should go in with the corn and tomatoes; raw meat needs browning in the bacon fat first and considerably longer than fifteen minutes to become tender.
- Render the bacon properlyDicing and frying crisp is the whole point: the rendered fat is the cooking medium for the onions and carries the flavour of the finished pot. Do not pour it off.
- Take the long cooking seriouslyFifteen minutes is the floor. Forty-five minutes to an hour at a bare simmer lets the tomato reduce and lose its tinny edge, which is what the note about slow cooking is getting at.
- Hold the bacon backIf you want the bacon to stay crisp, return only half of it to the pot and scatter the rest over the top at serving. Everything added at the start will soften in the tomato.
- YieldThe original gives no yield. With the meat included, the quantities would probably serve eight to ten as a main course; without it, perhaps six as a side.
Corn, tomatoes and onions stewed together in pork fat is a long-standing one-pot formula in North American cooking, loosely connected to the corn dishes colonists adapted from Indigenous farmers -- though succotash proper pairs corn with beans rather than tomatoes. The book's remark that corn makes this "a popular dish for 'Indian' meals" most likely points to the themed evenings that camp and scouting movements of the early twentieth century built around a romanticised idea of Native life. The recipe itself, however, says nothing about where or when it was cooked, so the setting can only be inferred.