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Baked Tomatoes
Wash but do not peel them. Cut each in two parts (around the tomato) and take out the pulp and seeds. To six tomatoes, take half a pint of bread crumbs, one large onion finely chopped, one ounce of butter, and salt and pepper to taste. Fill the cells of each piece with this dressing; put two halves together and tie with a thread. Put them in a pan with an ounce of butter and gill of water, and set them in a moderate oven; bake them until they are soft. Cut off the threads and serve on a hot dish. -Mrs. Albert Conro.
A straightforward stuffed tomato, hollowed, filled with a buttered onion-and-crumb dressing, and reassembled with kitchen twine. The only real difficulties are the old measures and the vagueness about the oven.
- Half a pint of bread crumbsThat is one cup by volume, not by weight. Use dry or day-old crumbs; fresh soft crumbs will pack down and turn pasty inside the tomato.
- A gill of waterA gill is half a cup, or four fluid ounces. It goes in the pan, not in the stuffing, and exists to keep the bottoms from scorching.
- A moderate ovenConventionally read today as somewhere around 350F, though the book itself gives no temperatures. At that heat six medium tomatoes will need roughly 30 to 40 minutes before they slump and the skins wrinkle.
- Cut around the tomatoCut across the equator, not through the stem end, so each half is a shallow cup that will sit flat and take a spoonful of filling.
- The raw onion is the weak pointOne large onion chopped raw into a cup of crumbs will still be sharp and crunchy when the tomato has collapsed. Sweating the onion in the ounce of butter first, until soft, then stirring in the crumbs, gives a far better filling and costs five minutes.
- Tying the halvesUse plain cotton kitchen twine, wrapped once around the equator and knotted. Anything synthetic or dyed should not go near a hot oven.
- Salt the shellsThe recipe skips this. A light salting of the scooped-out cavities, left ten minutes and drained, draws off water and keeps the dish from flooding the pan.
- Don't waste the pulpThe recipe says nothing about what to do with the pulp and seeds once removed. Strained, they make a few spoonfuls of tomato liquor worth adding to the pan in place of some of the water.
- YieldSix tomatoes serve six as a side dish, or three as a light supper with bread.
Stuffed and baked tomatoes appear in American cookbooks with increasing frequency through the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1900 the vegetable chapter of a general household cookbook could assume tomatoes were in every summer kitchen, and the bread-crumb-and-onion dressing here is the same sort of all-purpose stuffing these books put into peppers, onions, and baked fish. Cutting the tomato around its middle, filling both halves and tying them back together reads as a presentation device: the dish arrives looking like a whole tomato, and the thread is snipped away before serving. Contributed recipes signed with a married name, as this one is, are characteristic of the era's compiled community cookbooks.