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Broiled Tomatoes (Select four firm smooth ripe)
Select four firm, smooth, ripe tomatoes. Wipe them and cut out the hard center around the stem ends; then cut them in halves Crosswise. Rub the cut sides lightly with a clove of garlic and dip cut side in soft butter. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and buttered crumbs, pressing the crumbs into tomato with a broad knife. Arrange them in a well-greased wire broiler and broil with skin side down over glowing coals or under a gas flame until soft, using care that they do not scorch. Remove to hot serving platter, drop a bit of butter on each and serve immediately. Onion juice may be used in place of garlic. 3 bananas.
A straightforward broiler dish that survives the century intact, with one caveat: the original assumes a hinged wire broiler held over coals, which lets the halves cook skin-side down without sliding. A modern oven broiler needs slightly different handling.
- The stray line"3 bananas." at the end -- does not belong to this recipe; it appears to be a fragment from an adjacent entry. Ignore it entirely.
- Buttered crumbsNot a purchased product. Fresh or dry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter until they just clump, roughly 2 tablespoons butter to a half cup of crumbs. Panko works and browns more evenly.
- Broiler translationSet an oven rack so the tomato tops sit 5 to 6 inches from the element and preheat the broiler. Closer than that and the crumbs blacken well before the flesh softens, which is exactly the scorching the original warns against. Figure 8 to 12 minutes.
- Skin side downPut the halves cut side up on a greased rack or shallow pan. The original's hinged wire broiler sat over coals, with the heat coming from below; in a modern oven the heat is overhead, so the cut side must face it for the crumbs to brown.
- Choosing tomatoesFirm is the operative word. A dead-ripe slicer collapses into liquid under sustained heat. Slightly underripe fruit with dense shoulders holds its shape.
- Garlic rubCut a clove in half and drag the raw face across the tomato. This deposits far less than a minced clove would, which is the point; it perfumes rather than flavours.
- Onion juiceOnion juice of this sort was generally got by grating or scraping an onion and pressing out the liquid. A quarter teaspoon of finely grated onion brushed on does the same work.
- YieldEight halves, serving four as a side alongside a roast or chop. They do not hold; serve within a minute or two of leaving the heat.
Broiled tomatoes belong to the long American breakfast-and-supper tradition of cooking the fruit rather than serving it raw. The equipment named \— a well-greased wire broiler set over glowing coals — marks the book's transitional moment: gas ranges with overhead broilers were spreading through American kitchens in the 1910s, and the recipe hedges by giving both. The garlic rub is worth noting for the period. Garlic was often said to be regarded in much mainstream Anglo-American cooking as a foreign and overbearing flavour, and the technique of rubbing a cut clove over a surface and discarding it leaves only the lightest trace of it.