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Stuffed Tomatoes
Select six firm, smooth tomatoes. Cut a thin slice from the blossom end. Carefully scoop out the pulp and mix it with an equal quantity of cooked corn, rice or bread crumbs. Season with salt, pepper, a few grains cayenne, three tablespoons melted butter and a few drops of onion juice. Refill tomato cups, replace the tops, place them in a buttered baking dish and bake thirty minutes.
A simple stuffed-tomato recipe from a 1913 Sunday-dinner book, written for cooks who were expected to know their own stove. The gaps are mostly temperature and moisture control.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe never specifies a "moderate oven." A moderate oven, roughly 350-375F, suits the stated thirty minutes; hotter and the shells are apt to collapse before the filling heats through.
- Drain the shellsThe hinge of the dish. After scooping, salt the insides lightly and invert the cups on a rack for ten or fifteen minutes. Tomatoes are mostly water, and skipping this step gives you soup in the baking dish.
- The pulp is wet tooChop the scooped pulp and cook it down briefly in a pan before mixing with the corn, rice or crumbs, or the filling will never firm up. Fresh bread crumbs absorb more than dry ones; adjust by feel.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut, made by grating an onion and pressing the pulp through a sieve or cloth. A teaspoon of very finely grated onion, or a small amount of shallot softened in the butter, does the same work.
- Three tablespoons butterGenerous for six tomatoes by modern habit. Two is plenty if the filling is rice or corn rather than dry crumbs.
- Supporting the cupsSet the tomatoes close together in a dish just large enough to hold them, so they brace each other. A tablespoon of water in the bottom keeps the skins from scorching.
- YieldSix tomatoes. Enough for a side dish or a light supper course for four to six, depending on the rest of the meal.
Stuffed tomatoes appear across American cookbooks from the 1870s onward, once the tomato had shed what is often said to have been a long-standing reputation as suspect and become a fixture of the late-summer and autumn table. The technique here is thrift as much as cookery: the scooped pulp goes straight back into the filling, and the bulk comes from whatever starch the household already had cooked and cold, which is why corn, rice and bread crumbs are offered interchangeably. 52 Sunday Dinners was organised as a year of complete menus, so a dish like this earns its place by being a vegetable course that can be assembled ahead and slid into the oven alongside the roast. Onion juice and "a few grains cayenne" are hallmarks of the era's genteel American seasoning, which wanted savour without anything a diner could identify as spice.