Tomato Cheese Custard

[igenlode]

Another very successful recipe from the "120 ways of using Bread" vintage leaflet: 'Tomato Cheese Custard', which doesn't sound frightfully appealing but came out very tasty and sustaining, and quite attractive too :-)

It's effectively a sort of simplified soufflé which uses fresh breadcrumbs as thickening; I forgot to "well butter" my dish before putting in the tomatoes and didn't bother to skin them, but it still came out successfully. By halving all the quantitities I just about had enough bread left from my crumbled sourdough roll to create some very small fingers of hot buttered toast as accompaniment; one roll creates about a mugful of breadcrumbs, depending on size, which is more than one would think.

Tomato Cheese Custard

• 2 eggs
• 1 pint of milk
• 1 cupful breadcrumbs
• 3 heaped dessertspoonfuls of grated cheese
• Salt and pepper
• Tomatoes (I used a couple of salad tomatoes for a single helping)

Well butter a deep baking dish and put in a good layer of sliced and skinned tomatoes. Beat up the eggs in the milk. Stir in the breadcrumbs, grated cheese and salt and pepper to taste. Bake in a moderate oven until the custard is set. (It took an hour for mine -- the mixture gets much more liquid once the tomatoes start to break down.) Serve very hot with a dish of hot buttered toast cut into fingers on which a little red pepper has been sprinkled.