Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Baked Stuffed Tomatoes
Baked Stuffed Tomatoes
Prepare tomatoes by scooping out centers. Put into a basin 1 cup crumbs, season with salt and pepper, 1 dozen chopped olives, 2 tablespoons chopped capers, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 1 tablespoon Crisco, beaten yolks 3 eggs, and moisten with stock. Fill tomatoes and set in hot oven to bake. Sprinkle top with crumbs and dot with Crisco.
A savory crumb stuffing bound with egg yolk, from one of the Crisco-sponsored cookbooks of the 1910s. The original assumes you know how much stock "moisten" means, so that is the point worth pinning down first.
- Moisten, do not soakAdd stock a tablespoon at a time until the crumbs hold together when pressed — roughly 3 to 5 tablespoons for a cup of crumbs. Any wetter and the filling slumps into the tomato juices and never sets.
- "Hot oven"Period guides put this somewhere around 400-450F. Stuffed tomatoes at that heat should take roughly 20 minutes; watch for the skins splitting, which is the signal they have gone too far.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 and heavily promoted through books like this one. Modern all-vegetable shortening works identically; butter gives a better flavor for a dish this savory, and olive oil suits the olives and capers.
- CrumbsThe recipe does not specify; dry fine breadcrumbs will absorb the stock and egg better than fresh soft ones, which can turn to paste. Panko is coarser but acceptable for the topping.
- SaltA dozen olives plus two tablespoons of capers carry a great deal of salt on their own. Season the crumbs lightly and taste the mixture before filling.
- Prepare the shellsCut a lid from the stem end, scoop out the seeds and pulp, then salt the cavities and invert them for 15 minutes to drain. Choose firm, thick-walled tomatoes; a soft ripe slicer collapses.
- The yolksThree beaten yolks are the binder. They set during baking, so the filling should be firm rather than loose.
- YieldOne cup of crumbs with three yolks will fill roughly four to six medium tomatoes, depending on size.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s and 1920s: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product. Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening brought out by Procter & Gamble in 1911, needed exactly that kind of instruction, since American kitchens then reached for butter, lard or suet by habit — hence the tablespoon of Crisco in a crumb stuffing where an older book would have said butter. The dish itself is a standard of the period's egg and luncheon courses, where stuffed vegetables offered a meatless middle course that still felt substantial; the olives, capers and parsley put it in the same family as the Italian-influenced pomodori ripieni, though filings bound with egg yolk and breadcrumbs were common across English and American cookery of the time.