Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 207, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 August 1910 — THE USEFUL TOMATO [ARTICLE]

THE USEFUL TOMATO

REALLY A "NEW” VEGETABLE AND • DISTINCTLY AMERICAN. Has Special and Great Glories of Its Own and Is Now Indispensable Adjunct of Refined Cooking—Good In Salad. The tomato is really a “new" vegetable, and it is distinctly American, entirely unknown to the famous ancient cooks. Its acceptance in good culinary home circles was long delayed because of its undesirable family connections, and it was almost cooked to death aa. a condition of its final initiation. It is not a century since the tomato was taken over and gradually promoted to the selectest of edible circles. ♦ The tomato has special and great glories of its own. Its scarlet color, first, makes it a delight and an acceptable table complement to fieutral or colorless foods. Of late the wonders of that coloring, clears unblemished, deep enough to be emotional, has been shown us in splendidly handsome hothouse varieties. The wondroufe heavy, waxy reds, so widely popular in expensive artificial berry sprays, used for decorations, are entirely outdone, even in mechanical perfectness, by these symmetrical hothouse tomatoes as evenly and harmoniously perfect in every detail as though they had been cast'in a mold and decorated by the hand of a consummate artist. The tomato is now an indispensable adjunct of refined cooking. It affords the best seasoning and the most delicate of flavoring for many a dish. And the dainty dishes of its own are among the things few housekeepers would care to get on without. Rightly manipulated, it is delicious grilled, fried, baked, scalloped or stuffed. It is the mainstay of many a salad. In combination its possibiltles are almost infinitely diverse, its number of associations so great that there might be a different one for every day in the year. There are cooks and epicures who consider it is without a rival for soups. It is used in all sorts of forcemeats, with macaroni and spaghetti, with eggs, with rice, with peppers, with filets, with flesh and fowl, chicken or salt cod, and, stewed with okra, it is to some tastes as nectar to the gods. It is even used with breakfast bacon in a sort of twin importance at the first meal of the day. The commercially canned tomatoes have perhaps proved themselves more useful than any other vegetables in tins, but the home product is inestimably more desirable. It is not safe, especially in irregular seasons, for the city housewife to wait until a specified time to do any of her canning. She is always inclined, of course, to wait for the cheap abundance of the home-grown article, which, unfortunately, does not always come as it has not this year in the case of several of the fruits. She must keep her eye on the market If she is really thrifty, and perhaps learn to scan daily the commercial sections of the newspapers. On a day a market condition, perhaps induced by certain crop conditions somewhere within the wide climatic range from which our large city markets draw, may be such as to force down prices to their lowest in either i fruit or seasonable vegetables. The frugal home canner dees not miss the ( opportunities of that day.