Elementary School Stewed Tomatoes with Lima Beans

Max, I can’t thank you enough for that Lima Bean Soup recipe. You know how I hate the things! Probably my look would be as distasteful as Paris Hilton’s at seeing that on the menu, but that reminded me of another horrible lima bean dish from my childhood. In my elementary school, the cooks loved Stewed Tomatoes which seemed to appear on the menu at least once a week. Even now, almost half a century later, I can recall with shudder the dreadful smell this culinary travesty. It made everything in my lunch box taste bad and I would rush through eating just to get out of the cafeteria and its smell.

I wonder if the reason for the popularity (not a kid I knew would eat the stuff) of this dish was that no one would take a serving of it and so they didn’t have to fix much of it? There are actually recipes in old cookbooks for this, but in my school cafeteria recipes didn’t seem to matter. It was pretty much heat up something from a can. Here is how I would reconstruct this kid favorite.

Elementary School Stewed Tomatoes with Lima Beans:

Take a couple of commercial sized cans of whole tomatoes.Open and dump into a baking tray.Throw a few handfuls of crumbled crackers over tomatoes to absorb the excess juice.Dump in the lima beans leftover from the day before to add color.Bake until just barely hot.

This will serve hundreds of children.

Now the cafeteria ladies at my school weren’t total dunces. They knew that kids hated this thing so they would put out Weekly Menus that disguised the dish. It would appear as Winter Vegetable Casserole, or Tomatoes au Gratin, or Tomato Surprise. No matter what the name on the printed menu, it was exactly the same.

I was reminded of this recently when I reread conservative talk show host G. Gordon Liddy’s old biography Will. While in prison for refusing to testify about his part in the Watergate escapade, Liddy was given the job of trying to make the prison menu sound interesting and appealing. One of his literary inventions was something like Tomato Surprise which could be anything the cooks wanted it to be.

Call it what you wish, it was still Stewed Tomatoes and it is awful. Of course, that is my opinion. My husband says that while he was growing up he loved Stewed Tomatoes, and he occasionally will ask me to fix them. There are some things that no one should be asked to do, and fix Stewed Tomatoes, for me, is one of them. I am proud to say that they have NEVER appeared on my table.

Paris Hilton ought to read Will before she goes into the slammer. Liddy paints a graphic picture of what life was like in jail, and what he had to do to survive. The book is really about how Liddy developed the iron Will that made him such forceful character in American politics. Perhaps had Paris Hilton spent some time developing her character into a force for good, she wouldn’t be frittering her life away with parties and DUI’s.