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Escalloped Tomatoes
Cover the bottom of a buttered baking dish with prepared bread crumbs; fill with tomatoes that have been peeled and sliced; sprinkle a layer of bread crumbs on the tomatoes, a little finely minced onion, if liked; season highly with pepper and salt and melted butter.
A straightforward layered gratin, written in the shorthand of a period cookbook that assumed you knew the oven and the timing. Two things are left unsaid: how hot, and how long.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, for 35 to 45 minutes, until the top is browned and the juices are bubbling at the edges. If the crumbs colour too fast, cover loosely for the first half.
- "Prepared bread crumbs"This generally means dry crumbs from stale bread, rolled and sieved; some cooks also tossed them with melted butter. It is not the sandy commercial crumb sold in canisters. Coarse torn crumbs from a day-old loaf give a far better top layer.
- Build more than one layerThe instruction reads as a single sandwich, but the dish works best with two or three alternating layers, finishing with crumbs and butter. Keep the top crumb layer generous or the tomato liquid will soak straight through it.
- The hinge: drain the tomatoesSliced fresh tomatoes give up a great deal of water in the oven, and this is what turns escalloped tomatoes into soup. Salt the slices and let them sit ten minutes in a colander, then drain, before assembling.
- PeelingThirty seconds in boiling water and the skins slip off. In winter, drained canned tomatoes are a fair substitute and were used in this period too.
- "Season highly"Taken literally. Tomatoes baked with crumbs need considerably more salt than seems right, and a period cook would have used a heavy hand with black pepper. A pinch of sugar offsets sharp out-of-season fruit.
- Butter quantityNone is specified. Roughly 3 tablespoons melted butter for a 1.5-quart dish, some brushed over the crumbs and the rest dotted on the tomato layers.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of tomatoes fills a 1.5-quart dish and serves six as a side.
Escalloped dishes -- from the same root as scallop, meaning cooked in a shell or shallow dish -- were a staple of American cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the formula was applied to oysters, potatoes, corn, salmon and tomatoes with little change beyond the filling: crumbs below, crumbs above, butter and seasoning throughout. The recipe also reflects the period's slow acceptance of the tomato, which by 1900 had moved from suspicion to abundance and was being canned commercially in large volume, so that dishes like this one could appear on the table well outside the summer months.