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Escaloped Tomatoes
Put in a buttered baking-dish a layer of bread or cracker-crumbs seasoned with bits of butter, then a layer of sliced tomatoes seasoned with pepper, salt, and sugar if desired, then a layer of crumbs, and so on till dish is full, finishing with the crumbs. Bake from three-quarters of an hour to an hour. Onions, prepared by soaking over night in hot water, dried well, sliced in nearly half-inch slices, and browned on both sides in a frying-pan with butter, may be added, a layer on each layer of tomatoes.
A layered gratin that depends almost entirely on managing the water the tomatoes give off. The original assumes a hot-enough oven and a long enough bake to drive that moisture away.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; period ranges rarely had a working oven thermometer, and the cook judged by hand and eye. Bake at 350F for the stated three-quarters of an hour to an hour; the top should be well browned and the edges bubbling rather than watery.
- The hinge: drain the tomatoesSliced fresh tomatoes release a great deal of liquid. Salt the slices and let them sit in a colander for 20 minutes before layering, or the bottom crumbs will turn to paste. Canned whole tomatoes, drained and torn, also work and were common in period cookery.
- Bread or cracker crumbsNineteenth-century cracker crumbs meant plain soda or water crackers, coarser and less salty than modern saltines. Coarse dry breadcrumbs or torn stale bread give the closest texture; fine commercial crumbs pack down and go gluey.
- Butter the layers generously"Bits of butter" is the only fat in the dish and it is what keeps the crumbs separate. Figure roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons total for a 2-quart dish, dotted across each crumb layer.
- The sugarAdded to correct the acidity of underripe or out-of-season tomatoes. With good summer fruit it is unnecessary; a pinch per layer is plenty if you use it.
- Soaking the onionsThe overnight soak in hot water was most likely a way to draw the harshness out of strong storage onions. Modern sweet or yellow onions do not need it. Slice them nearly half an inch thick, dry them well as the recipe directs, brown them in butter, and layer as directed.
- Dish and yieldBuilt in a 2-quart baking dish this will run to about four layers and serve roughly six as a side, depending on how deep you build it. Let it stand 10 minutes out of the oven so the layers set enough to cut.
"Escaloped" (more often scalloped) described any dish built up in layers with crumbs and butter and baked in a shallow dish. Tomatoes were often distrusted in the United States earlier in the nineteenth century and grew steadily more common on the table over its course; canned tomatoes were among the earliest commercially preserved foods to be sold widely. The Dixie Cook-Book, compiled in the 1880s from Southern contributors, treats them as thoroughly ordinary, and this recipe belongs to a large family of scalloped vegetable dishes in period books that all follow the same crumbs-fat-vegetable pattern. The overnight soaking of onions in hot water assumes strong, long-stored onions of a kind rarely sold now.