Baked Tomatoes
Wash and wipe medium-sized tomatoes, cut them in halves and place skin side down in a baking dish. Then season with salt and white pepper and a little sugar, if liked; cover with prepared bread crumbs and bake until the crumbs are nicely browned and the tomatoes well cooked. A little minced onion, if liked, adds greatly to the baked tomatoes. A tablespoonful to each quart of tomatoes. The onion may be added to the top or bottom of the dish they are baked in.
A straightforward gratin of halved tomatoes that assumes you already know what "prepared bread crumbs" means and that your oven has no dial. Two details govern the result: crumb moisture and drainage.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Bake at 375F, which browns crumbs at about the rate the tomato halves collapse and soften — roughly 30 to 40 minutes for medium tomatoes.
- "Prepared bread crumbs"The book does not define the term; in this period it most often meant dried crumbs from stale bread worked with melted butter. Dry crumbs straight from a canister will scorch before they take on fat; count on about 2 tablespoons butter per cup of crumbs.
- Quantity of onionA tablespoon of minced onion per quart of tomatoes is a very light hand — a quart of halved tomatoes is roughly 2 lb, or six to eight medium fruit. Raw minced onion scattered under the tomatoes will still be crunchy at 30 minutes; sweat it in butter first if that matters to you.
- DrainageHalved tomatoes release a great deal of liquid, which pools and turns the crumb layer to paste. Salt the cut faces, let them stand 15 minutes, blot, then arrange them in a dish just large enough to hold them so the juices do not spread.
- White pepperThe book specifies it without saying why; in pale dishes it was the conventional choice, and it keeps the crumb topping unspeckled. Black pepper will work if you do not mind the flecks, though the two are not identical in flavour.
- The sugarMarked optional in the original ('if liked') and still useful with underripe or winter tomatoes. A pinch per half is plenty; more and the topping caramelizes and darkens before the fruit is cooked.
- YieldTwo pounds of tomatoes serves four as a side dish. Serve hot from the baking dish — reheated, the crumbs go soft.
Baked or scalloped tomatoes with a buttered crumb top were a fixture of American cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, once the tomato had shed its long reputation as suspect and became one of the most widely grown garden vegetables in the country. The dish belongs to a whole family of crumb-topped bakes — scalloped oysters, scalloped corn, scalloped potatoes — that solved the same problem: a vegetable in glut, stale bread on hand, and an oven already hot from the day's baking.