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Baked Corn and Tomatoes
2 cups cooked corn (fresh or
Pepper canned)
1 teaspoon sugar
2 cups tomatoes (fresh or
1 cup fresh bread-crums canned)
3 tablespoons butter or savory
1 teaspoon salt fat
Mix seasonings with the corn and tomatoes and pour all into a greased baking-dish. Spread the crums over the top, dot them with the butter, and bake in a moderate oven for one-half hour. This is a satisfactory way of utilizing left-over corn or tomatoes.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the book's two-column setting; read down each column and it resolves into corn, tomatoes, salt, pepper, sugar, bread-crumbs and butter. Nothing here is difficult, but a few particulars are worth stating.
- The ingredient list, untangled2 cups cooked corn (fresh or canned), 2 cups tomatoes (fresh or canned), 1 teaspoon salt, pepper, 1 teaspoon sugar, 1 cup fresh bread-crumbs, 3 tablespoons butter or savory fat. "Savory fat" means bacon drippings or similar rendered fat, not the herb.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven of the period is generally read as somewhere around 350-375F. Half an hour is enough to heat the mixture through and colour the crumbs, since both vegetables are already cooked.
- Drain the tomatoesCanned tomatoes carry a great deal of liquid and the recipe gives no thickener. Drain them well, or the dish comes out soupy under a soaked crumb layer.
- Fresh bread-crumbsSoft crumbs torn or grated from day-old bread, not dry packaged crumbs. They absorb some of the vegetable liquid and brown under the dotted butter; dry crumbs stay sandy.
- The sugarA teaspoon in four cups of vegetables is seasoning, not sweetening. It offsets the acidity of the tomatoes; taste before adding it if your tomatoes are ripe and sweet.
- Browning the topIf the crumbs are still pale at the end of the half hour, a minute or two under the broiler finishes them. Watch it closely.
- YieldFour cups of vegetables serves four to six as a side dish, baked in a shallow dish of about a quart and a half so the crumb layer is generous relative to the depth.
Corn and tomatoes baked together under crumbs belongs to a large family of American scalloped vegetable dishes associated with the spread of canned goods in the household pantry in the late nineteenth century. The Butterick book, published by the pattern company for a readership of home sewers and housekeepers, is frank about its purpose here: this is a way of using up leftovers, and the recipe's closing line says so outright. Buttered crumbs over baked dishes were a common American finish of the period.