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Baked Tomatoes
6 tomatoes
1 cup bread-crums
4 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon sugar
Salt and pepper
Peel the tomatoes and cut them in slices one-fourth of an inch thick. Place a layer of tomatoes in a pudding-dish, and sprinkle over them a little salt and pepper. Rub the butter into the crums with the sugar. Spread the mixture thickly upon the tomatoes, using all of it, and add another layer of tomatoes. Add bits of butter, sprinkle with dry crums, and bake twenty minutes.
A simple scalloped tomato bake from the era when "pudding-dish" meant any deep ovenproof dish. The original gives no oven temperature, so that is the first gap to fill.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified, which was normal when ranges had no thermometers. Twenty minutes for a shallow dish of sliced tomatoes and crumbs suggests a fairly hot oven; around 400F works, giving a browned top before the tomatoes collapse.
- Pudding-dishA deep ovenproof baking dish, usually earthenware and round or oval. Any 8-inch square or 1 1/2-quart ceramic dish works; keep the layers shallow so the liquid reduces rather than pools.
- "Crums"The recipe uses crumbs twice: the cup rubbed with butter and sugar for the middle layer, and a separate scattering of dry crumbs on top for crispness. Soft crumbs torn from a day-old loaf suit the buttered layer, though the text does not specify which kind.
- Rubbing butter into the crumbsWork the softened butter and sugar through the crumbs with your fingers until every crumb is coated. Coated crumbs stay distinct in the tomato juice; loose crumbs turn to paste.
- The butter is oversubscribedYou are told to use all four tablespoons in the crumb mixture, then to add "bits of butter" later. Hold back a tablespoon for dotting the top, or add a fresh tablespoon.
- Peeling the tomatoesCut a shallow X in the base, drop into boiling water for 15 to 20 seconds, then into cold water; the skins slip off. Peeling matters here because unpeeled slices shed curls of skin into the crumbs.
- The sugarA teaspoon across six tomatoes is seasoning, not sweetening; it offsets the acidity of underripe or hothouse fruit. With very ripe summer tomatoes you can halve it.
- YieldFour to six side servings. Let it stand five minutes out of the oven so the juices thicken slightly before serving.
Baked or scalloped tomatoes belong to the late-nineteenth-century American vegetable repertoire, by which time tomatoes were widely grown for the garden and the canning jar, having shed a reputation as suspect nightshades that is often said to have dogged them earlier, though the story is more tradition than documented fact. The technique here is the standard "scallop": alternating layers of a vegetable and buttered crumbs, baked until the top browns, a formula applied equally to oysters, potatoes and corn in the same books. The pinch of sugar is a period reflex, since much of the fruit reaching a household kitchen was picked firm and shipped, or came from a garden at the shoulders of the season. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, issued cookbooks and household manuals as part of a broad publishing program aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its magazines, and the recipes are correspondingly brief and assume a cook who already knows what her own oven does.