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Escaloped Tomatoes
Put into an earthen baking dish a layer of cracker crumbs and small bits of butter; then a layer of tomatoes with a very little sugar sprinkled over them, then another layer of cracker crumbs seasoned with butter, and a layer of tomatoes, until your dish is full, with the cracker crumbs at the top; pour over all this a little water to moisten, and bake half an hour.
A plain layered gratin with no oven temperature, no quantities and no salt. All three are easy to supply, but the balance of liquid is what decides whether this comes out as a pudding or a soup.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes you know your range. Bake at 375F; half an hour is right at that heat for a dish two to three inches deep, and the top should be browned and the edges bubbling.
- Cracker crumbsNineteenth-century "crackers" were hard soda or water crackers, closer to a modern saltine or oyster cracker than to a butter cracker; salt levels varied. Coarsely crushed saltines work; reduce added salt accordingly. Roughly 1 1/2 cups of crumbs to 3 cups of tomatoes is a workable scaling, though the recipe gives no quantities.
- The tomatoesEither canned whole tomatoes, drained of most of their juice and broken up, or fresh tomatoes peeled and thickly sliced. Fresh tomatoes give off considerably more liquid, so skip the added water entirely if you use them.
- "A little water to moisten"This is the hinge. Crackers swell and drink, but too much liquid and the layers collapse into mush. Two to four tablespoons over a full dish is plenty with canned tomatoes; the juice clinging to the fruit does most of the work.
- ButterDot rather than melt and pour, as written. About 3 tablespoons total for a 1 1/2-quart dish, weighted toward the top layer so the crumbs brown.
- Sugar and seasoningThe "very little sugar" corrects acidity; a scant teaspoon over the whole dish is enough with modern canned tomatoes. Salt and black pepper are not mentioned but are needed, on each tomato layer.
- The earthen dishAn unglazed or glazed earthenware baking dish. Any ceramic or glass casserole of about 1 1/2 quarts does the same job; avoid bare cast iron, which reacts with the acid.
- YieldAs scaled above, four to six as a side dish. It sets up on standing, so give it ten minutes out of the oven before serving.
Escaloped, scalloped or escalloped dishes in American cookbooks of the 1870s meant almost anything layered with buttered crumbs and baked, a technique borrowed from oysters and applied freely to fish, potatoes, corn and tomatoes. Cracker crumbs were one common American choice, since hard water and soda crackers kept indefinitely in a barrel and were a kitchen staple in a way that spare loaf bread often was not. The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1874) was compiled from contributions by local women and sold to benefit the Home for the Friendless, and recipes of this kind are often written in a similar shorthand: quantities and oven heats are left out because the reader was assumed to have made something like it before. The pinch of sugar is a period habit worth noticing, aimed at the sharpness of tomatoes.