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Baked Tomatoes
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. Make a stuffing of one cup of bread crumbs; one tablespoon of butter; one teaspoon of salt; one-fourth teaspoon of pepper; one teaspoon of sugar. Rub the butter into the crumbs, and add the salt, pepper and sugar. Spread the mixture thickly upon the tomatoes, using all of it, and add another layer of tomatoes. Dot the top with pieces of butter, dust with pepper and a little sugar, strew with dry crumbs, and bake covered for one-half an hour; then remove the lid, and bake until brown.
A scalloped tomato dish from the era when tomatoes were still being coaxed into respectability with sugar and butter. The original leaves both the quantity of tomatoes and the oven temperature to the cook's judgment, so those are the first things to settle.
- How many tomatoesNone is specified. A 1½- to 2-quart pudding dish takes about 2½ lb of tomatoes, roughly 6 medium, sliced. Serves four to six as a side.
- Oven temperatureUnstated, but a covered vegetable dish of this kind belongs at 375F. Half an hour covered, then 15 to 20 minutes uncovered to brown the top.
- "Pudding dish"A deep ovenproof baking dish with a lid, not a mold. Any covered casserole works; foil over an open dish is fine for the first stage.
- The hinge: drain the tomatoesPeeled slices shed a great deal of liquid and the crumb layer turns to paste. Salt the slices lightly, lay them on a rack or towel for 20 minutes, and blot before assembling. The salt you use here should be subtracted from what follows.
- SaltA full teaspoon in the crumb mixture, plus salt on each tomato layer, reads high by current palates. Half a teaspoon in the crumbs is enough if you have already salted the slices.
- Two kinds of crumbsThe recipe specifies 'dry crumbs' only for the topping, which suggests the cup rubbed with butter was meant to be softer fresh crumbs that absorb the tomato juices, while the dry topping crisps rather than steams.
- PeelingThirty seconds in boiling water and then into cold water slips the skins off cleanly. Skins left on curl into tough strips during a long bake, so there is a practical reason for the instruction.
- The sugarA teaspoon in the crumbs, plus a little more dusted on top; most likely to offset the acidity of the fruit rather than to sweeten it. With modern hothouse tomatoes it is often unnecessary; with sharp field tomatoes in late summer it earns its place.
Scalloped or baked tomatoes appear in many American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the pattern is usually much the same: peeled slices, buttered crumbs, a pinch of sugar, a slow bake. The formula belongs to a period when the tomato had only recently become an everyday vegetable in American kitchens in the 1840s and, by tradition at least, long regarded with suspicion, and still commonly cooked at length rather than eaten raw. The butter and sugar are doing the same work as the long baking: taming a fruit whose acidity cooks of the day found assertive. The Butterick Cook Book came from the Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, and it seems to address a cook with an oven she trusted and a vegetable garden or a greengrocer nearby — hence a recipe that specifies the stuffing to the quarter-teaspoon but assumes you can judge how many tomatoes fill your own dish.