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Broiled Tomatoes
Take large, round tomatoes, wash and wipe dry, and put them on a gridiron over lively coals, the stem side down. When brown, turn them and let them cook till quite hot through. Place them on a hot dish and send quickly to the table, when each one may season for himself with salt, pepper and butter.
A two-ingredient method that lives or dies on the fruit: firm, thick-walled tomatoes and a fire hot enough to blister them before they collapse. The transcription repeats several phrases, an artifact of the original printing rather than a second instruction.
- The hingeStart stem side down and leave the tomatoes alone until the underside is genuinely browned. Turning too early, or fussing with them, breaks the skin and the juice runs into the coals.
- "Lively coals"A bed of charcoal or wood embers burned down to grey ash with a red glow, hot enough to brown the skin quickly. A gas grill on high or a cast-iron ridged pan over high heat does the same work.
- GridironA flat iron grate set directly over the fire, the ancestor of the modern grill grate. Bars set close together matter here, since a broiled tomato softens and will sag through a wide grid.
- Choosing tomatoesLarge, round, slightly underripe fruit with dense flesh holds together; ripe heirlooms and beefsteaks slump. Halving them across the equator gives more surface to brown, though the recipe as written grills them whole.
- TimingThe recipe's only cues are browning on the first side and heating through on the second; roughly ten minutes total for whole tomatoes, less for halves, judged by eye.
- Broiler versionUnder a domestic broiler, place the rack 3-4 inches from the element on high, cut side up, and expect 6-8 minutes with no turning. The result is softer than a coal fire gives, with less char.
- Seasoning at tableThe recipe leaves all seasoning to the diner. Send a pat of butter, flaked salt and a pepper mill to the table as written.
- YieldOne large tomato per person as a side dish; two if it is standing in for a vegetable course.
Broiled tomatoes appear as a breakfast and supper vegetable in American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century, by which time the tomato had shed its earlier reputation as suspect and become a common garden crop. The instruction to send the dish to the table unseasoned and let each diner add salt, pepper and butter is a pattern found in period cookbooks, which frequently stress carrying hot vegetables in at speed. The gridiron was becoming a period detail by 1900, as coal ranges with broiling ovens displaced open-hearth cooking in city kitchens.