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Rice and Tomato
Cut up small piece of pork size of egg. With two small onions fry until brown. Add can tomatoes and when warmed through, add 1 cup cooked rice. Serve hot.
— Mrs. Frank E. Foster
A three-line skillet supper of the sort community cookbooks are full of: salt pork rendered down, onions browned in the fat, tomatoes and leftover rice. The whole thing rests on getting real color on the pork and onions before the tomatoes go in.
- What "piece of pork" meansAlmost certainly salt pork or fat back — a cured slab kept on hand for frying fat — rather than fresh loin, though the recipe does not say so. A piece "size of egg" is roughly 2 to 3 ounces. Thick-cut bacon is the closest supermarket substitute; if you use salt pork, dice it small and render it slowly so the fat comes out before the bits crisp.
- The can of tomatoesCanned tomatoes of the period came in larger cans than today's 14.5-ounce standard: a No. 2 held about 20 ounces, a No. 2½ about 28, a No. 3 about 32. A 28-ounce can of whole or diced tomatoes, juice and all, is a reasonable match for the proportions here.
- Brown the onions properly"Fry until brown" is the hinge. Two small onions, sliced or chopped, want eight to ten minutes over medium heat in the pork fat until genuinely browned at the edges, not merely softened. This is the only depth of flavor the dish has.
- RiceOne cup of cooked rice — leftover, cold, and preferably a bit dry. Freshly steamed hot rice will absorb the tomato liquid and turn the pan to porridge. Add it at the end and warm it through, no more than two or three minutes.
- Seasoning the original assumesNo salt or pepper is listed; if the pork was salt pork, it would have supplied the salt, and brief recipes of this kind often omit seasoning altogether. With bacon or with unsalted pork, taste and season at the end; canned tomatoes also want a pinch of sugar if they are sharp.
- YieldServes three to four as a side, two as a light main. It scales up cleanly in a wide skillet, which is where it belongs — a deep pot steams rather than reduces.
Rice, tomato and a scrap of salt pork is a thrift dish with a long reach: variations turn up as Spanish rice, as red rice in the Carolina Lowcountry, and as the Creole rice dishes of the Gulf, all built on the same logic of stretching a little cured pork and a cheap starch with tomatoes. What dates this particular version is the can. By the time church societies were compiling fundraising cookbooks in the early twentieth century, canned tomatoes were among the cheapest and most reliable groceries in America, and recipes calling simply for "can tomatoes" eassassumed to know — are a familiar sight in such books. The recipe also quietly assumes a bowl of cooked rice already sitting in the pantry, which tells you as much about the period's kitchen habits as anything in the instructions.