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Tomatoes in Haste
Butter a pie-dish, preferably a fireproof china dish. Open a tin of tomatoes and remove as much skin as you can if they are the unpeeled kind. Put a handful of crumbled brown bread in the dish with lumps of butter, then pour on that some tomatoes, dust with pepper and salt, then more bread, and so on, finishing at the last with lumps of butter, and a thick sprinkling of grated cheese. Bake for twenty minutes.
A layered tomato and breadcrumb gratin with no oven temperature and no quantities — the sort of thing written down by someone who had made it a hundred times. A few decisions have to be made for you.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. Twenty minutes implies a fairly brisk oven: 400F (200C) will brown the cheese and set the layers in that time. At 350F you will need closer to 35 minutes and the top will stay pale.
- Fireproof chinaPie-dishes of the period were commonly plain earthenware, and "fireproof china" denoted an early ovenproof ware, which is presumably why the author preferred it. Any modern ceramic or glass baking dish works. Something shallow and wide, around 8 inches, gives the best ratio of crust to filling.
- Drain the tinThis is the hinge. A tin of tomatoes carries a great deal of liquid, and poured in whole it risks reducing the bread to soup in twenty minutes. Tip the tomatoes into a sieve, keep the juice back, and add only as much as you need to moisten each layer.
- Brown breadWholemeal, not a sweet modern brown loaf. Slightly stale bread torn into rough crumbs holds its shape; fresh bread packs down and goes pasty. A crumbled handful per layer, two or three layers deep.
- The cheeseAn unspecified "grated cheese" in a British-published book of this date would most likely have been a hard Cheddar-type cheese, though grated Parmesan was also common in period recipes. Gruyere or a well-aged Gouda melts cleanly if you prefer it.
- Quantities and yieldThe recipe gives none. A standard tin of tomatoes, roughly 3 oz of bread, 2 oz of butter in lumps and 2 oz of cheese fills a small dish and serves two as a supper or four as a side. Scale straight up.
- SeasoningTinned tomatoes of the period were generally packed with little or no seasoning; salt, pepper and the butter are the whole flavouring here. A pinch of sugar between layers is worth considering if the tomatoes are sharp.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in 1915 from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and it reads throughout as a record of cooking done in other people's kitchens with whatever was on hand. "In haste" is the point of this one: a tin, some stale bread, butter and cheese, twenty minutes, no chopping. Tinned tomatoes were by then widely available in Britain, and the note about removing skins "if they are the unpeeled kind" suggests the tinned product was not yet standardised. The dish belongs to the broad European family of bread-and-tomato bakes uscan pappa al pomodoro, or a strata where yesterday's loaf is the body of the meal rather than an accompaniment to it.