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Tomato Cream Toast
1½ cups stewed and strained tomato 3 tablespoons butter ½ cup scalded cream 1/4 teaspoon soda 6 slices toast 3 tablespoons flour 1/2 teaspoon salt Put butter in saucepan; when melted and bubbling, add flour, mixed with salt, and stir in gradually tomato, to which soda has been added, then add cream. Dip slices of toast in sauce.
Serve as soon as made.
A creamed-tomato sauce poured over toast — a supper dish from the era when white sauce carried half the American dinner table. The whole thing succeeds or fails on keeping the tomato from curdling the cream.
- The hinge: soda, then creamThe quarter teaspoon of soda neutralizes enough acid in the tomato that the cream will not break when it goes in. Add the soda to the tomato and let it foam out before the cream joins the pan, and keep the heat moderate — a hard boil after the cream is in will still curdle it.
- The cream measurementThe original reads "1½ cup scalded cream," which is almost certainly a typesetter's slip for 1½ cups, matching the tomato. If you want a thicker sauce closer to a cream gravy, use 1 cup.
- Stewed and strained tomatoIn 1896 this meant fresh tomatoes cooked down and pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seed. A can of tomato purée or well-blended and strained canned tomatoes gives the same thing; avoid tomato sauce sold pre-seasoned.
- Scalded creamHeating cream to just below a simmer, until it shimmers and a film forms at the edge. With modern cream it mainly keeps the sauce from cooling when it hits the pan, so it is worth doing but not essential.
- Cook the roux brieflyButter, flour and salt want half a minute or so of bubbling before the liquid goes in, enough to lose the raw-flour taste without coloring.
- "Dip slices of toast"Not a light dunk: the toast is meant to soak. Use bread cut thick and toasted dry so it holds together.
- Serve at onceThere is no salvaging this after it sits. The toast turns to paste within a few minutes, which is why the instruction is the last line of the recipe.
- YieldSix slices, so a light supper or lunch for three, or a first course for six.
Creamed dishes on toast were the workhorse of late-nineteenth-century American home cooking, and Fannie Farmer's book devotes a long stretch of the bread chapter to them — milk toast, cream toast, and this tomato variant among them. The appeal was economic as much as culinary: a white sauce stretched small amounts of butter and cream over stale bread and turned it into a dish fit to put in front of company or an invalid. The pinch of soda is a period habit that has largely fallen out of use in home kitchens, though the chemistry behind it is sound, and it appears repeatedly in cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s wherever acid and dairy had to be persuaded to share a pan. Tomatoes themselves had only recently become a genuinely everyday ingredient in the American kitchen, helped along by commercial canning after the Civil War, which meant a cook could reach for stewed tomato in January.