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Baked Tomatoes
Select six smooth, firm, ripe tomatoes. Wash, wipe and cut a slice from the stem end; scoop out the seeds and soft pulp. Mix with the pulp an equal amount of corn cut from the cob, one tablespoon finely chopped green pepper, half tablespoon finely chopped onion. Season with salt and pepper, add one and one-half tablespoons melted butter and a teaspoon salt. Mix well and refill tomato cups; sprinkle tops with buttered crumbs. Place tomatoes in a granite dripping pan and bake until tomatoes are soft and crumbs are brown. Remove to serving dish with a broad knife and serve.
A straightforward stuffed-tomato dish that assumes more oven knowledge than it states. Two things need supplying: a temperature and a decision about the salt.
- Oven temperature and timeNo heat is given. Bake at 375F for 25 to 30 minutes, until the shells slump slightly and the crumbs have browned. Much hotter and the tomatoes collapse before the filling is hot through.
- The salt is doubledThe recipe says to season the filling with salt and pepper and then to add a further teaspoon of salt. For six tomatoes that is too much by modern palates; use about half a teaspoon total and taste the filling before it goes in.
- Granite dripping panGranite ware is speckled enamel over steel, a common roasting pan of the period. Any shallow baking dish or sheet pan with a rim works. Set the tomatoes close together so they hold each other upright.
- Drain the shellsThe hinge of the dish. After scooping, salt the insides lightly and stand them upside down for ten minutes. Tomatoes hollowed and filled straight away release enough liquid to leave the crumbs pale and the filling soupy.
- Corn cut from the cobLate in the year fresh sweet corn would have been past its season, so canned corn was the likelier source. Scrape the cob with the back of the knife after cutting to get the milky liquid, which binds the filling. Frozen kernels, thawed and patted dry, are a fair substitute.
- Buttered crumbsFresh soft breadcrumbs tossed in melted butter, not dry commercial crumbs. Roughly half a cup of crumbs to a tablespoon of butter covers six tomatoes.
- YieldSix tomatoes, one apiece as a side dish with roast meat, or three servings as a light supper course.
Stuffed and baked tomatoes turn up constantly in American cookbooks from the 1880s onward, by which point the tomato — often said to have laboured under a long reputation as suspect — had become one of the most-grown things in the kitchen garden. The pairing here with sweet corn, green pepper and onion is a distinctly American combination, close kin to the succotash and corn-and-tomato stews of the same books. It is a reminder that a Sunday-dinner book was organised around what the market and the cellar held: late tomatoes, ripened indoors or bought firm, and corn that late in the year was more likely canned than fresh. The instruction to lift the finished tomatoes with a broad knife is still the best way to move a baked tomato without splitting it.