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Stewed Tomatoes
Scald and peel the required quantity of tomatoes, cut them into halves or quarters, place them in a lined saucepan, and stew them for a quarter of an hour, when the juice will be partly boiled away. If desired the tomatoes may be thickened with a little cornstarch, moistened with cold water or with cracker or breadcrumbs. Turn the stew out onto a dish, sprinkle over with salt and pepper to taste, place a few lumps of butter on the top let it melt, and then serve. A little sugar may also be sprinkled over if desired. Stewed Tomatoes (Sweet).
Scald and peel a dozen or so of ripe tomatoes, place them in a baking-dish and cover with sugar; put the dish in a hot oven and bake the contents until the sugar has melted and dried down to a syrup. Take them out, and serve.
Two versions of the same vegetable, one savory and one closer to a dessert. Neither gives quantities beyond "the required quantity," so both are scaled by eye.
- A lined saucepanIn 1896 this meant a copper pan lined with tin, or an enameled iron one — the point was to keep tomato acid off bare copper or iron, which turns the fruit metallic and gray. Any stainless, enameled, or nonstick pan does the job now; avoid unlined cast iron and raw aluminum.
- Scald and peelScore an X in the blossom end, drop the tomatoes into boiling water for 20 to 30 seconds, then into cold water. The skins slip off in sheets. This only works on ripe fruit; underripe tomatoes cling and are better peeled with a serrated peeler.
- "A quarter of an hour"Fifteen minutes is right for reducing the juice of peeled summer tomatoes over medium heat. Firmer or hothouse fruit gives off less liquid and may need less; taste rather than watch the clock.
- ThickeningAbout a teaspoon of cornstarch slaked in cold water per pound of tomatoes is plenty. Cracker or breadcrumbs, the other option the recipe offers, give a softer, more pudding-like body — roughly a quarter cup of crumbs per pound, stirred in during the last few minutes.
- "A hot oven"For the sweet version, read this as somewhere around 400 to 450F. The sugar has to melt and reduce rather than merely dissolve, so err on the hotter side.
- Sugar in the sweet versionNo quantity is given, so it is genuinely open. Start with about a third of a cup per pound of peeled tomatoes and add more if the fruit is tart.
- YieldFigure roughly a half pound to a pound of tomatoes, two or three medium ones, per person as a side dish. They cook down considerably.
Stewed tomatoes were one of the most ordinary things on an American table in the 1890s, and they duly appear in The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896), which was not a record of hotel service alone but a general household compendium. The tomato is generally said to have become widely accepted as a food in the United States sometime around the 1830s and 1840s, and by the end of the century it was both a garden staple and one of the first commercially canned vegetables, which is part of why so many nineteenth-century books treat stewing it as the default preparation. The sweet baked version is a reminder that the fruit's classification was still unsettled in the kitchen: cookbooks of the period also put tomatoes into preserves, marmalades, and mock-fruit pies, treating them much as one would a firm plum.