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Stewed Tomatoes
Pour boiling water on fresh tomatoes, and after they have remained covered one minute, take them from this water and plunge them into cold water. With a knife remove the skins and the hard stem ends, and cut the tomatoes in pieces. Stew in a graniteware or porcelain-lined kettle for thirty minutes; then add to every quart one tablespoon of butter, one teaspoon of salt and a one-fourth of a teaspoon of pepper. Stew until of the desired thickness and serve. Some prefer to add bread crumbs or cracker crumbs for thickening, and to boil but thirty minutes. Canned tomatoes may be cooked in the same way.
A straightforward stewed tomato, and the only technical points are the blanching, the choice of pan and the seasoning ratio.
- Blanching timesOne minute in boiling water is generous for ripe summer tomatoes; 20-30 seconds is usually enough, and the cold-water plunge stops the flesh cooking further. Score the skin at the blossom end first and it will slip off in one piece.
- Why graniteware or porcelain-linedTomatoes are acidic enough to react with bare cast iron, aluminium or unlined copper, picking up a metallic taste and a grey cast. Any modern stainless, enamelled cast iron or nonstick pan does the same job the enamelware did.
- Seasoning per quartA quart is 4 cups of cut tomatoes, roughly 2 1/2 to 3 lb of whole fruit, or a little more than one 28-oz can. Scale the tablespoon of butter, teaspoon of salt and quarter-teaspoon of pepper accordingly.
- Thirty minutes is a floor, not a ruleHalf an hour breaks the tomatoes down; how much longer depends entirely on how watery the fruit is. Cook uncovered so the liquid actually reduces, and stir toward the end when the mixture starts to catch.
- Salt late if the tomatoes are very juicyThe recipe adds the butter and salt only after the first stew; whatever the reason, one practical effect is that you judge the seasoning against the reduced volume rather than the raw.
- Crumb thickeningAbout 1/4 cup of dry bread or cracker crumbs per quart will bind the stew in a few minutes. Add them at the end and stir constantly; they swell fast and will sit on the bottom and scorch if left alone.
- Canned tomatoesUse whole peeled tomatoes with their juice and cut them up in the pan. Canned fruit is already cooked, so it needs 15-20 minutes rather than thirty, and modern canned tomatoes are often salted, so taste before adding the full teaspoon.
- YieldA quart of prepared tomatoes reduces to about 2 to 2 1/2 cups stewed, serving four as a side dish.
Stewed tomatoes were a fixture of American vegetable cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, when the tomato shifted from a suspect curiosity to one of the most widely grown garden crops in the country. The recipe's two paths -- fresh fruit in season, canned the rest of the year -- reflect how quickly commercial canning changed the tomato's place on the table; by the time this recipe was printed, canned tomatoes were among the cheapest and most reliable tinned goods available. The insistence on graniteware or porcelain-lined kettles is a period marker in itself: enamelled iron cookware was heavily promoted in the late 1800s, and is often said to have been favoured for acidic foods like tomatoes, fruit butters and pickles, where older tinned or iron pots gave off-flavours. Thickening with bread or cracker crumbs is a thrifty way to give a watery vegetable body without flour or cream.