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Scalloped Tomatoes
To every cup of stewed tomatoes add half a teaspoonful of scraped onion and more seasoning if necessary. Season some dried and rolled breadcrumbs and mix part of them with melted butter in the proportion of two tablespoonfuls butter to half a cup of crumbs. Butter small ramekins or large dish, sprinkle a layer of seasoned crumbs on the bottom, pour in tomato, and spread buttered crumbs over the top. Dot over with more butter if desired. Bake in hot oven about thirty-five minutes, browning crumbs well on top. A mixture of bread and cracker crumbs may be used.
A straightforward crumb-and-tomato bake built to use up the last of a pan of stewed tomatoes. A few of the original's assumptions need translating.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in this period is roughly 400-425F. Thirty-five minutes at that heat suits a large dish; individual ramekins will brown in 20-25 minutes.
- Stewed tomatoesThe book assumes home-stewed tomatoes, thicker than most canned. A 14.5 oz can of diced tomatoes, drained of most of its liquid, gives roughly a cup. Too much juice and the crumbs go to paste.
- Dried and rolled crumbsNot fresh crumbs. Stale bread was dried out in a cooling oven and crushed with a rolling pin, giving something close to modern dry breadcrumbs. Panko is coarser but works if you want more crunch.
- Scraped onionHalve an onion and scrape the cut face with a spoon or the back of a knife to collect pulp and juice without any pieces. A fine grating on a microplane gives the same result.
- Butter proportionTwo tablespoons to half a cup of crumbs is a generous ratio and it is what browns the top. Toss the crumbs in melted butter until evenly coated rather than pouring butter over them in the dish.
- SeasoningThe original leaves this open. Salt and pepper, with a pinch of sugar if the tomatoes need their acidity corrected; a little dried thyme or a dash of Worcestershire is at home here.
- YieldA cup of tomatoes with its crumbs will fill about two small ramekins, enough for two as a side. Scale by the cup.
Scalloped dishes are generally held to take their name from the shell — scallop shells are traditionally said to have served as the individual baking vessels for creamed and crumbed mixtures, and the word survived long after the shells were replaced by ramekins and gratin dishes. By the late nineteenth century "scalloped" in American cookbooks commonly meant anything layered with buttered crumbs and browned in the oven, and tomatoes were a frequent candidate because the crumbs absorb their liquid and give the dish body. Stewed tomatoes were a standing item in a household that put up its own summer crop, and a cupful going spare on Tuesday became a hot side dish on Wednesday with nothing bought in but butter. Thrift cookbooks of this kind proliferated in the first decades of the twentieth century, and their logic — a set of methods for turning yesterday's cooked food into today's meal — assumed a cook who already knew how to season by taste.