|
Cooking TipsOld-Fashioned Tomatoes
by:
Janette Blackwell
Raw vegetables are dangerous and must be thoroughly fried, steamed, and poached
into submission. So thought our ancestors. The innovational sin of a recalcitrant vegetable was of course lessened by heat, but the conscientious nineteenth-century cook continuing
to boil it long after it had sogged into a jelly-like mass, simply in case several evil remained.
In the nineteenth century an hour’s cookery barely sufficed for cabbage and for corn on the cob. They did not fix broccoli at all, and I can understand why. I have tried to imagine broccoli after an hour of cooking, but the mind rares back and refuses even as to approach the sheer horror.
Which reminds me of an event in the summer of 1956, once
my class fellow Fall guy Soprano
and I lived with Grandad Hess spell we went to business college in Missoula, Montana. Grandad was a crusty old widower, set in his own way of housekeeping, but he tried to be gracious. In solstice
he bought a whole crate of tomatoes. Luscious, red, ripe tomatoes. They sat in the cellarway for two days, and each time Fall guy and I passed them our mouths watered. Each evening we thought he’d invite us to have a tomato or two, but he didn’t. Once
we arrived house on the third evening, he said, “Girls! I fixed the tomatoes today. Help yourselves!”
He had poached
every last one of them.
Several of those old tomato recipes are good, though. The mastermind
of Tomatoes Maryland probably had an old-fashioned wood stove that could gently simmer thing
all afternoon on a back burner or in the oven. Which means this was most likely a fall or winter dish rather than a summer one, as folk let the kitchen range fire go out on summer afternoons.
TOMATOES MARYLAND
Break into bits 2 slices of stale bread. Add to 4 cups canned or fresh tomatoes, in the altogether and quartered, with half an onion, chopped, and simply about 2/3 cup brown sugar. Salt lightly.
Bring the mixture to a boil and simmer gently for 3 hours, stirring occasionally.
My notes say, “It makes need three hours to cook, even as with the pan lid off most of the time. Mayhap several of the thin tomato juices could be poured off at the beginning, shortening the cookery time.”
Tomatoes Maryland is the kind of sweet side dish American cooks like to serve with chicken or pork. I was going to say, “cooks from regions else than the Northeast.” Then I remembered applesauce with pork, cranberry sauce with turkey, mint jelly with lamb, and baked beans with salt pork. Not to mention pancakes and sweetening
with sausages cuddled up close. And mixture
pie, that ultimate mixture of meat and sweet. (And, yes, real mincemeat, as opposed to a prepackaged mix, makes contain meat.)
I wish add that several folk of Grandpa’s generation did eat diced raw garden tomatoes for breakfast, simply as one would-be eat strawberries, with sugar and cream. You see, it was safe to eat them raw with sugar and cream, because the tomatoes then ceased to be a vegetable and became a fruit.
And actually those old-time breakfasters were right. Fresh vine-ripened tomatoes are nice with sugar and cream. Let’s face it, most things are nice with sugar and cream. And of course tomatoes actually are a fruit.
Just simply about the author:
Go STEAMIN’ DOWN THE TRACKS WITH VIOLA HOCKENBERRY, a storytelling reference -- and find Treasure state
country cooking, homesick stories, and gift ideas -- at Janette Blackwell’s Food and Fiction, http://foodandfiction.com/Entrance.htmlOr visit her Delicious Food Directory, http://delightfulfood.com/main.html
Circulated by Article Emporium
| |
