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Rictum-Dity
1/2 pint (I cup) grated cheese I can tomatoes 1½ small grated onion 1 teaspoonful salt 2 beaten eggs 2 tablespoonfuls butter I green pepper, chopped Mix the tomatoes, cheese, onion and the pepper.
Melt the butter in a chafing-dish, add the mixture, and when heated add the salt and the eggs well beaten. Cook until the eggs are of a creamy consistency, stirring and scraping from the bottom of the pan. Serve at once with crackers or strips of buttered toast.
A chafing-dish supper dish in the rarebit family, and it depends entirely on heat control: the eggs go in last and must set into a custard, not scramble. Everything else is flexible.
- Cheese measureHalf a pint means half a pint by volume, which the recipe itself glosses as 1 cup grated — somewhere around 3 to 4 oz of cheese depending on how coarsely it is grated. A mild to medium cheddar or a period-style American cheese melts smoothest; aged cheddar tends to string and weep oil.
- The can of tomatoesCanned tomatoes of the period came in more than one size, so treat a modern 14–15 oz can as a reasonable working substitution. Drain off most of the juice or break up whole tomatoes and let them cook down first, or the sauce will be too thin to coat toast.
- The onion quantity"1½ small grated onion" is probably a garbling of ½ a small onion, grated. A tablespoon or two of grated onion is enough; more will dominate the cheese.
- Chafing dishThe original assumes a chafing dish over a spirit lamp — gentle, indirect heat. A heavy saucepan over low heat, or a double boiler, gives the same protection. On a direct high burner the cheese will break and the eggs will curdle.
- The hinge: the eggsAdd the beaten eggs only once the tomato and cheese mixture is hot and smooth, then pull the pan nearly off the heat and stir constantly, scraping the bottom. You want thickened and creamy in two to three minutes; another minute gives you grainy tomato scrambled eggs.
- SaltA full teaspoon is generous when the cheese is already salted. Add half, taste at the end, and adjust before the eggs go in.
- Green pepperChop it fine. The recipe mixes it in with the tomatoes and cheese from the start; softening it in the butter first will take the raw crunch and grassiness out of it.
- YieldServes three to four as a light supper or lunch over toast, more as a hot dip with crackers. It does not hold or reheat — the eggs tighten and the cheese separates — so serve straight from the pan.
The odd name is one of many spellings of what American cookbooks around 1900 printed as Rum Tum Tiddy, Rinktum Ditty, Rinktum Tiddy or Rum Tum Ditty — a tomato-and-cheese cousin of Welsh rarebit, usually said to be a nonsense name in the same playful vein as "rarebit" itself. Dishes like this belonged to the chafing dish craze of the 1890s and early 1900s, when a spirit-lamp pan on the sideboard let hosts cook at the table after the theatre or during late evenings without troubling the kitchen range. That context explains the whole design: canned tomatoes and grated cheese need no preparation, the cooking takes minutes, and the result is scooped onto crackers or toast fingers — a hot savoury for people who had grown tired of plain rarebit.