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Stewed Tomatoes
Wipe, pare, cut in pieces, put in stewpan, and cook slowly twenty minutes, stirring occasionally. Season with butter, salt, and pepper.
A bare-bones Fannie Farmer entry that assumes you already know what a tomato ought to look like when it is done. The only real decisions are how much liquid to cook off and how much butter to finish with.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. Six medium tomatoes, about 2 lb, makes four small side servings; season with roughly 1 tablespoon butter, half a teaspoon salt and a few grinds of pepper.
- "Pare"Peeling raw tomatoes with a knife wastes flesh. Score an X in the base, drop them into boiling water for 15-30 seconds and into cold water, and the skins slip off. The skins are edible, but left in they curl into tough shreds in the finished stew.
- No added waterRipe tomatoes give up plenty of their own liquid within a minute or two over low heat. Start them in a heavy pan over medium-low, uncovered, and stir occasionally as the original directs, and they should not scorch.
- Twenty minutesThat is enough for a soft, spoonable stew but not enough to reduce watery out-of-season fruit. If the pan is loose and thin at twenty minutes, keep going uncovered until it mounds slightly on the spoon.
- Butter lastAdd it off the heat, along with the salt, so it emulsifies into the juice rather than breaking. Salting earlier draws out yet more water.
- Canned tomatoesA 28-oz can of whole tomatoes, broken up, stands in directly and needs about the same twenty minutes. They often taste sharper than ripe fresh fruit, so a pinch of sugar is fair game.
- StewpanAny wide, heavy saucepan or a low-sided sauté pan. Width matters more than depth here because evaporation is doing the work.
Stewed tomatoes appear in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book because in 1896 the tomato was still a summer glut vegetable and a winter can, and both forms wanted using up. Fannie Farmer's book is famous for standardizing level measurements, yet plain vegetable entries like this one often give no quantities at all. The dish itself is older than the book by a long way: tomatoes were being stewed with butter in American cookery texts well before the Civil War, and the same preparation, thickened with bread or crackers, is often linked to scalloped tomatoes and tomato soups.