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Escalloped Tomatoes
1 pint peeled and cooked 2 cups grated bread tomatoes or 1 small can crumbs 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter A suggestion of pepper Reserve 3 tablespoons of bread crumbs and spread the remainder on a pan. Brown in the oven, being careful not to burn them. Mix the tomato, browned crumbs, salt, pepper and half the butter together, and put in a shallow baking dish. Spread the unbrowned crumbs on top, and dot with the remainder of the butter cut into bits. Bake in a moderately hot oven 350°F. for half an hour. The top of this dish should be brown and crisp.
A plain scalloped tomato, notable mainly for one step most modern versions skip: toasting the crumbs before they go into the mixture. The ingredient list has been scrambled by the two-column layout of the original page.
- The ingredient list, untangledRead it as: 1 pint peeled and cooked tomatoes (or 1 small can), 2 cups grated bread crumbs, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 tablespoons butter, a suggestion of pepper. A pint is 2 cups; a "small can" of the period is not a fixed quantity, so use whatever tinned tomato comes closest to a pint.
- Grated bread crumbsThese are dry crumbs made by grating stale bread on a box grater, coarser and fluffier than commercial fine crumbs. Panko or hand-torn dried bread gives closer results than the sandy canned kind, which packs down and turns pasty.
- Why the crumbs get browned firstThis is the hinge. Crumbs stirred into tomato raw will dissolve into mush; toasted crumbs hold their structure and keep the interior from going soupy. Toast them dry in the oven at 350F for 8-10 minutes, stirring once.
- OvenThe recipe supplies its own number, 350F, and calls it "moderately hot" -- a reminder that the descriptive oven terms were still loose even once figures were being printed alongside them. If the top has not browned by the end of 30 minutes, finish it under the broiler for a minute rather than extending the bake.
- Salt and acidityA teaspoon of salt for 2 cups of tomato is on the assertive side by modern taste; start with half and adjust. Canned tomatoes vary a great deal in acidity, and a pinch of sugar turns up in some period recipes for a can that tastes sharp.
- Dish and yieldA shallow 8-inch square or 1-quart gratin dish is right; depth is the enemy of a crisp top. Serves four as a side.
Escalloped or scalloped dishes are generally traced to the shallow shell-shaped vessel food was once baked in, and the word came in time to mean any dish layered with crumbs or sauce and browned in the oven. Scalloped tomatoes belong squarely to the American canning age: tomatoes were among the earliest and cheapest commercially canned vegetables, and a recipe that begins "1 pint peeled and cooked tomatoes or 1 small can" assumes the reader may have either a garden surplus or a pantry shelf. The Metropolitan Cook Book was published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given away to policyholders, part of a broader early-twentieth-century movement in which insurers and utilities distributed household guidance as public-health work; the aim was cheap, nourishing, uncontroversial cooking, and this dish fits that brief exactly.