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Corn and Tomatoes, Baked
Use equal quantities of cooked corn cut from the cob, and raw tomatoes peeled and sliced, adding to a pint of each, one tablespoon of salt, three tablespoons of butter, one-half pint of bread crumbs, one-half teaspoon of pepper and one teaspoon of sugar. Mix the seasoning with the corn and tomatoes, and pour all into a baking-dish. Spread the crumbs over the top, dot them with the butter, and bake one-half hour. This is a satisfactory way of utilizing corn that has been left over.
A leftovers dish that works well, with one measurement that needs correcting before you start.
- The salt is the problemA full tablespoon of salt for a quart of vegetables is around three times what a modern palate accepts. Use about a teaspoon, taste, and adjust.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 375F, which browns the crumb topping in about the same half hour the vegetables need.
- Quantities in pintsA pint is 2 cups. A pint of cut corn is roughly 3 to 4 ears; a pint of sliced peeled tomatoes is 2 to 3 medium ones. A half pint of bread crumbs is 1 cup, and dry crumbs from stale bread hold up better than fresh.
- Where the butter goesThe seasoning is mixed into the vegetables, but all 3 tablespoons of butter go on top of the crumbs. Dot it in small pieces so it spreads as it melts rather than soaking one spot.
- Tomato liquidRaw sliced tomatoes shed a lot of water in a covered-in dish. Salt the slices for ten minutes and drain, or use a shallow wide dish so the excess reduces instead of pooling under the crumbs.
- PeelingDrop the tomatoes in boiling water for 15 to 20 seconds, then into cold water, and the skins slip off. The book assumes the cook already knows this.
- YieldAbout 4 to 6 side servings. It reheats acceptably but the topping goes soft; crisp it under the broiler.
The Butterick Cook Book came out of the same New York publishing house that sold dress patterns and The Delineator, and it shares that magazine's practical, thrifty temper — note that the recipe ends by naming its real purpose, using up yesterday's corn. Corn and tomatoes baked together under crumbs belongs to a broad family of American summer vegetable dishes that also produced succotash and stewed corn with tomatoes, all of them dependent on the brief weeks when both crops are in at once. Before home canning of corn was common and before freezers, cooked sweet corn cut from the cob was a genuine surplus problem in August, and casseroles like this one seem to have been one common answer. The crumb-and-butter top reads as a familiar finish for baked vegetables in this period, doing the work that grated cheese does in later cookbooks.