In the nineteenth century a hour's cooking scarcely got the job done for cabbage and for fresh corn. They didn't fix broccoli by any means, and I can comprehend why. I have endeavored to envision broccoli following a hour of cooking, however the brain rares back and rejects even to approach the sheer loathsomeness.
Which helps me to remember an occasion in the late spring of 1956, when my schoolmate Patsy Sutherland and I lived with Grandpa Hess while we went to business school in Missoula, Montana. Grandpa was a hard old single man, set in his own specific manner of housekeeping, however he attempted to be charitable. In midsummer he purchased an entire case of tomatoes. Tasty, red, ready tomatoes. They sat in the cellarway for two days, and each time Patsy and I passed them our mouths watered. Each night we thought he'd welcome us to have a tomato or two, yet he didn't. When we arrived home on the third night, he stated, "Young ladies! I fixed the tomatoes today. Help yourselves!"
He had stewed each and every one of them.
A portion of those old tomato formulas are great, however. The originator of Tomatoes Maryland most likely had an antiquated wood stove that could delicately stew something throughout the evening on a back burner or in the broiler. Which implies this was in all likelihood a fall or winter dish instead of a late spring one, as individuals let the cookstove fire go out on summer evenings.
TOMATOES MARYLAND
Break into bits 2 cuts of stale bread. Add to 4 containers canned or new tomatoes, stripped and quartered, with a large portion of an onion, slashed, and around 2/3 glass darker sugar. Salt gently.
Heat the blend to the point of boiling and stew tenderly for 3 hours, mixing periodically.
My notes state, "It needs three hours to cook, even with the dish top off more often than not. Maybe a portion of the slim tomato juices could be poured off toward the starting, shortening the cooking time."
Tomatoes Maryland is the sort of sweet side dish American cooks like to present with chicken or pork. I was going to state, "cooks from districts other than the Northeast." Then I recollected fruit purée with pork, cranberry sauce with turkey, mint jam with sheep, and prepared beans with salt pork. Also hotcakes and syrup with hotdogs nestled very close. Furthermore, mincemeat pie, that extreme blend of meat and sweet. (Furthermore, indeed, genuine mincemeat, instead of a bundled blend, contains meat.)
I will include that a few people of Grandpa's age ate diced crude greenhouse tomatoes for breakfast, similarly as one would eat strawberries, with sugar and cream. It was sheltered to eat them crude with sugar and cream, on the grounds that the tomatoes at that point stopped to be a vegetable and turned into a natural product.
What's more, really those bygone era breakfasters were correct. Crisp vine-matured tomatoes are great with sugar and cream. Let's be honest, most things are great with sugar and cream. Also, obviously tomatoes truly are a natural product.
