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Scalloped Tomatoes
Remove contents from one can tomatoes and drain tomatoes from some of their liquor. Season with salt, pepper, a few drops of onion juice, and sugar if preferred sweet. Cover the bottom of a buttered baking-dish with buttered bread crumbs, cover with tomatoes, and sprinkle top thickly with buttered crumbs. Bake in a hot oven until crumbs are brown.
A pantry dish built on canned tomatoes and stale bread, and it stands or falls on drainage. Wet tomatoes turn the crumb layers to paste.
- Hot ovenNo temperature is given; a modern equivalent of roughly 400-425F suits the instruction to brown the crumbs. Twenty-five to thirty minutes should be enough to brown the top and heat the tomatoes through.
- One canPeriod cans of tomatoes ran roughly a pint to a quart, so a modern 28 oz can is a fair stand-in. That gives a shallow 8-inch dish or a 1-quart baking dish; expect about four servings as a side.
- Drain properlyThe instruction to drain "some of their liquor" is the hinge. Tip the tomatoes into a sieve for several minutes and break up the whole ones; too much juice and the bottom crumb layer dissolves rather than crisping.
- Buttered crumbsToss dry crumbs with melted butter (roughly a tablespoon of butter to every half cup of crumbs) until every crumb is coated. Coated crumbs brown; bare crumbs go leathery. Something like 1 1/2 cups of crumbs will cover both layers.
- Onion juiceMade by grating a halved onion on a fine grater and using the liquid. A teaspoon of very finely grated onion or a pinch of onion powder does the same work.
- SugarA teaspoon is plenty against a sharp canned tomato. Modern canned tomatoes, especially those packed in puree, are often sweeter to begin with; taste first.
- Building itTwo layers as written are the minimum, but alternating three thinner layers gives a better ratio of crisp to soft. Keep the top layer generous, since it does all the browning.
Scalloped dishes - anything layered with buttered crumbs and baked - were a fixture of nineteenth-century American cooking, a way of stretching a small quantity of something into a dish that filled a bakeware pan and used up stale bread. That this version begins with a can rather than fresh fruit says a good deal about the period: commercial tomato canning had grown enormously in the United States after the Civil War, and by the time Fannie Farmer was writing, canned tomatoes were cheap, reliable and available in winter when fresh ones were not. The cookbook's vegetable chapter treats the can as an ordinary ingredient rather than a compromise, which was still a relatively new attitude. The pinch of sugar reflects an older American taste for tomatoes on the sweet side, and Farmer's hedge - "if preferred sweet" - leaves the argument open.