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Summer Casserole
6 hard-cooked eggs
2 teaspoons salt
3 ripe tomatoes
1½ cups milk
3 tablespoons butter or other ½ cup grated cheese fat
Oiled crums
3 tablespoons flour
Cut hard-cooked eggs in half and arrange around the edge of a greased casserole or baking-dish. Slice peeled ripe tomatoes in the center of the dish. Make a white sauce of the milk, fat and flour.
Add cheese, and stir over a very low fire until the cheese is well mixed and smooth. Pour over tomatoes and eggs. Cover with oiled crums and bake twenty minutes in a moderate oven. The centers of the tomatoes may be scooped out, and a whole egg placed in each, if desired.
FRENCH RECIPES
A cheese-sauce gratin of eggs and tomatoes, straightforward once the ingredient list is untangled — the original column layout has scrambled the pairings, so read it as: 6 hard-cooked eggs, 3 ripe tomatoes, 3 tablespoons butter or other fat, 3 tablespoons flour, 2 teaspoons salt, 1½ cups milk, ½ cup grated cheese, and oiled crumbs.
- OvenA moderate oven is 350F. Twenty minutes is enough to heat the sauce through and colour the crumbs; the eggs are already cooked and will turn tough and weeping if held longer.
- Oiled crumsButtered breadcrumbs — soft crumbs tossed with melted butter or a light oil until evenly coated, roughly ¾ cup crumbs to 2 tablespoons fat. They are the browning element; dry untossed crumbs will only scorch in patches.
- The cheese goes in off the boilThe cheese goes in over the barest heat -- the recipe says to stir "over a very low fire" until the cheese is smooth. A cheese sauce brought back to a simmer will break and go grainy, so keep the heat very low, or take the pan off the heat altogether and stir until the cheese has melted.
- SaltTwo teaspoons for a dish of this size is heavy by modern palates, particularly with a salty aged cheese. The recipe does not say where it goes; start with half a teaspoon in the sauce and taste after the cheese has melted.
- Sauce consistencyThree tablespoons each of fat and flour to 1½ cups milk gives a medium sauce that will thin as the tomatoes release liquid. Salting the tomato slices for ten minutes and blotting them keeps the finished dish from going watery.
- CheeseAn unnamed "grated cheese" in an American book of this period usually means a firm store cheddar. Anything that melts cleanly works; ½ cup grated is about 2 oz.
- CasseroleHere the word does mean the dish rather than the pan — a shallow one, 8 or 9 inches, so the eggs sit in a single ring and the crumbs cover the surface.
- YieldSix halved eggs serve four as a light supper or lunch dish, three if it is the main event. The variation with a whole egg set in each hollowed tomato makes three portions.
Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published household books aimed at the middle-class housekeeper managing without staff, and one-dish baking spread quickly in American kitchens once gas and electric ranges made oven heat cheap and predictable, and heatproof glass and earthenware that could go from oven to table became widely available in the years around the First World War. The dish itself is an economy of the cheese-sauce tradition, a béchamel enriched with cheese, endlessly recombined with whatever vegetable was in season, which is exactly what the "summer" of the title signals.