Crushed for Chili, also.
Regular whole tomatoes are sober.
(stolen from a MAD Magazine bit that must be sixty years old)
OK, since I’m going to make some sort of New Orleans-inspired shrimp dish for dinner tonight, I bought a can each of Red Gold Stewed and Red Gold Crushed Tomatoes. Also, while I was at the store, I was comparing the difference between Del Monte and Hunts branded versions of both.
Here’s what I found:
In all cases, the stewed tomatoes had added flavorings to them: dried onion, celery, and bell pepper (hey, Cajun holy trinity right there.) They also had added sugar. The regular diced tomatoes did not. All brands, otherwise, also included tomatoes and tomato juice (and I think they all had calcium chloride and citric acid.) Also, both the diced and stewed tomatoes contained added salt, but the sodium levels of the diced were below that of the stewed product, so I’m assuming they had less added salt.
In terms of taste testing, the first thing I noticed when I opened the can of Red Gold stewed tomatoes was the smell of celery powder (and probably the other flavorings, but unmistakable celery smell to me). The diced tomatoes, of course, smelled only of tomatoes. Taste test? I actually was surprised. The texture seemed the same to me with both. I expected the stewed tomatoes to be more broken down compared with the diced but, if they were, I couldn’t tell. Also, flavorwise, the base tomato flavor didn’t seem different or more “cooked” to me in the stewed tomatoes vs the diced tomatoes, although I found the flavor covered up a bit by the dehydrated onion, celery, and green pepper.
Now how is this different than the flavored diced tomatoes, I’ll have to leave for another day. But, from comparing the plain stewed to the plain diced Red Gold tomatoes, the obvious difference was that of flavoring, somewhat like the difference between tomato juice and V8.
You can also use baking soda to take out the acidic taste of tomatoes.
Thanks, Ukelele Ike (and everybody else who contributed). And that’s how Mom and Dad liked them: as a side dish.
They seem harmless enough. Maybe I should try them again, for the first time. 
My mom always grated a carrot into the sauce to decrease the acidity. Me, I put cheese in towards the end of the (long, slow, low heat) cooking.
I seem to remember a long long time ago my grandfather loving his stewed tomatoes over white bread. 
. He was really old, born just before the 20th century.
It’s my uninformed opinion that “stewed”, as it refers to tomatoes, is just a product selling word for “tomatoes with seasoning”, and has nothing to do with stewing as a cooking method.
All of the above refer to the canned stewed tomatoes. Stewed tomatoes is also a traditional Pennsylvania Dutch dish where skinned and seeded tomatoes are cooked and reduced, seasoned with pepper and onion, often sweetened with sugar, and thickened with bread or cornstarch to form a delicious hot tomato pudding. In comparison, those canned tomatoes should be ashamed of themselves.
Given what I’ve seen in this thread, I’d agree. They seem pretty harmless, and like I said, I just might try them again for the first time.
It may have been the name “stewed tomatoes” that turned us kids off, way back when. My Mom was no cook, but she tried–and too often, failed. At least once a week, we had “beef stew,” made from the leftovers of last Sunday’s beef roast. It was invariably awful. I started to enjoy beef stew when I had it from a can (Puritan Beef Stew?) at camp. Mom’s stew was so bad that canned stew was better than hers.
So perhaps the word “stew” turned us kids right off. If Mom’s beef stew was yucky, then “stewed tomatoes” must have been even yuckier. I liked tomatoes well enough, and quite liked sliced tomatoes (especially in sandwiches) and tomato juice, but equating them with the slop that Mom called stew–yeah, no way. If she had called them “seasoned tomatoes,” we might have had a different view. At least, then we’d know they had more flavour than the frozen vegetables she boiled the crap out of most nights. I should try stewed tomatoes.
Nah, I say, if a relatively small amount of sugar encourages someone to eat a vegetable at all, or to eat an additional serving of veggies they’d otherwise skip that day, that’s an overall benefit. Fiber, antioxidants, and vitamins that would otherwise be missing entirely.