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Tomato and Cheese Toast
Season weli Left-over slices of raw tomatoes may be acceptably utilized by placing one slice each on nicely browned and buttered toast circles. Season well with salt, pepper, and bits of butter. Cover with grated cheese and heat in oven until cheese is melted.
A two-minute assembly that depends almost entirely on the tomato slice being thick enough to survive the oven. A few notes before you start.
- The garbled openingThe stray "Season weli" at the head of the text is a printer's or scanner's error, duplicated from the sentence that follows. Ignore it and read the recipe from "Left-over slices."
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A hot oven, around 425F, melts the cheese before the toast dries out; the broiler works equally well at two to three inches from the element. Watch it, since the window between melted and scorched is about a minute.
- Toast circlesCut with a biscuit cutter or a drinking glass from sliced bread, which is what the phrase means here. Presumably the rounds were for the sake of appearance; squares taste identical.
- Tomato thicknessSlices under a quarter-inch collapse into the bread and make it soggy. Half-inch slices hold their shape, and blotting them on a towel first keeps the toast crisp.
- The cheeseThe recipe says only "grated cheese"; a firm store cheese of the cheddar type would suit it. Grate it yourself; pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch that keeps it from flowing smoothly.
- YieldOne round per tomato slice. Two or three rounds make a light lunch or supper dish.
Cookbooks devoted to leftovers were a small industry, sitting within the broader household economy tradition. The premise of such books is that nothing bought raw should be scraped into the bin, and a few slices of tomato cut for a salad that nobody finished were exactly the sort of remnant they existed to rescue. The technique itself is the whole family of savoury toasts, or "toast dishes," that filled luncheon and supper menus of the period, cheese on toast being the oldest and best known of them; adding a tomato slice gives the dish colour and turns a cheese course into something closer to a small meal.