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Tomato Toast
Run a quart of stewed ripe tomatoes through a colander, place in a porcelain stew-pan, season with butter, pepper and salt and sugar to taste; cut slices of bread thin, brown on both sides, butter and lay on a platter, and just as the bell rings for tea add a pint of good sweet cream to the stewed tomatoes, and pour them over toast.-Mrs. S. Watson.
A creamed-tomato dish poured over toast, meant to reach the table the moment it is assembled. Nearly everything that can go wrong here is a matter of timing and heat.
- Add the cream off the boilThe instruction to add the cream "just as the bell rings for tea" is the hinge of the recipe. Tomato acid curdles cream that is heated with it, so pull the pan from the heat, stir the cream in, and serve at once.
- QuantitiesA quart of stewed tomatoes is about 4 cups; two 28-oz cans of whole tomatoes with their juice, stewed down by close to half, will get you there. A pint of cream is 2 cups, which makes a distinctly rich sauce; half that gives a lighter one.
- "Sweet cream"This means fresh, unsoured cream, as opposed to the cultured sour cream that was common in nineteenth-century kitchens. Heavy or whipping cream is the closest modern equivalent and is also the least likely to split.
- Porcelain stew-panEnamelled cast iron or any nonreactive pan. The point was to keep acidic tomato off bare iron or copper, which discolours the sauce and gives it a metallic edge; stainless steel serves the same purpose.
- Running through a colanderBefore food mills were standard, tomatoes were pressed through a colander or sieve to strip skins and seeds. A food mill or a brief blitz and a strainer does the same job faster.
- SugarThe recipe says sugar to taste, and how much depends entirely on the tomatoes. Taste before adding; a teaspoon is usually enough to round the acid, and canned tomatoes that already carry added sugar need none.
- The toastThin slices, browned dry on both sides and then buttered, hold up better than thick soft bread. Butter the toast at the last minute and pour the sauce over just before it goes to table, or it turns to pulp.
- YieldServes four to six as a supper dish, two slices of toast each.
Creamed tomatoes on toast belong to the American "toast dish" family that filled out light suppers and tea tables through the second half of the nineteenth century, alongside milk toast, cream toast, and creamed chipped beef. Toast provided a way to serve something warm and substantial without meat. That this recipe calls for a full quart of stewed tomatoes suggests either the summer glut or a store of home-canned jars; home canning of tomatoes was increasingly common by the 1880s. The attribution to Mrs. S. Watson is typical of a book assembled largely from contributed household receipts rather than written by a single hand.