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Tomato Toast
Add a few bits of celery to a cup or two of cold stewed tomatoes, and cook them down until well thickened. Prepare a platter of toast, and butter it. Scald a cup of cream, but do not boil. When all is ready add a very little soda to the tomatoes, then the cream, pour directly over the toast and serve.
A late-Victorian supper dish built on the same logic as creamed chipped beef: a thickened sauce poured over buttered toast. The whole recipe hinges on keeping the cream from curdling when it meets the acid of the tomatoes.
- The soda is the hingeA pinch of baking soda — no more than 1/8 teaspoon for two cups of tomatoes — neutralises enough acid to stop the cream breaking. Add it off the heat, let it foam and subside, then pour in the cream. Too much soda gives a soapy, flat taste and dulls the tomato colour.
- Scald means about 180FHeat the cream until it steams and a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge of the pan, then take it off. Boiling it here makes curdling more likely, not less, and gives a cooked-milk flavour.
- Combine sauce into cream, not the reverseIf you are uneasy about the soda, temper instead: whisk the hot tomato slowly into the scalded cream. Acid added to dairy in a thin stream breaks far less readily than dairy dropped into acid.
- Cold stewed tomatoesYesterday's stewed tomatoes are the point of the recipe, but a 14-oz can of whole or diced tomatoes, drained and chopped, is a reasonable stand-in. Cook down until a spoon drawn through leaves a clear track.
- The celeryCut into small dice, not the "few bits" of a leftover stalk if you want it tender; it needs eight to ten minutes in the simmering tomato. Leaves and pale inner ribs are best here.
- Seasoning is left unsaidAs printed there is no salt, pepper or sugar. Season the tomato before the soda goes in, and taste again after the cream, which mutes salt noticeably.
- ToastUse a firm bread cut thick and toasted dark; thin sandwich bread collapses under a cream sauce within a minute. Butter it while hot and sauce it at the table.
- YieldTwo cups of tomato and a cup of cream will sauce four to six slices — supper for two, or a first course for four.
The Cook Book of Left Overs belongs to a wave of American household manuals from the 1900s and 1910s that treated thrift as a technical skill, with chapters organised by what was in the icebox rather than by course. Toast under a sauce was the standard vehicle for such salvage: cheap, filling, and able to absorb almost any thickened leftover. The trick of neutralising tomato acid with a little soda before adding milk or cream was widely printed in this period and is often said to have been common in cream of tomato soup; it works, but it is a chemical shortcut around a problem that modern cooks more often solve by tempering or by thickening the tomato with a roux. Stewed tomatoes themselves were a fixture of the American table well into the twentieth century, put up by the jar in late summer and served plainly enough that a cup or two left in the dish was an entirely ordinary thing to find.