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TOMATO (au Gratin)
Cut half a dozen tomatoes into halves, remove the pips, and fill the insides with a mixture of bread-crumbs, pepper, and salt, in due proportions. Place a small piece of butter on each half tomato, and then lay them close together in a well-buttered tin. Bake in a slow oven for about half an hour, then serve. They may be eaten hot or cold.
A plain baked stuffed tomato, and one that depends almost entirely on the tomatoes themselves. Two details in the original are worth adjusting.
- Oven temperature"Slow oven" is conventionally taken to mean somewhere around 300-325F; Cassell's itself gives no temperatures. Half an hour at that heat will soften the tomatoes and warm the crumbs but leaves the tops pale; if you want colour, finish under a hot grill for two minutes at the end.
- Drain the shellsThe hinge of the dish. Once the seeds and jelly are scooped out, salt the cut halves lightly and let them sit inverted for ten minutes before filling. Otherwise the crumbs absorb the liquid and the filling slumps into paste.
- Bread-crumbsProbably dry, sieved white crumbs rather than the coarse fresh sort, and certainly not packaged orange crumbs, though the book does not specify. Dry crumbs from a day-old loaf, or panko, hold their texture better than fresh.
- "In due proportions"For six tomatoes, roughly a cup of crumbs with about half a teaspoon of salt and a good grinding of pepper. Grated cheese, chopped parsley or a little garlic are all in keeping if you want more than the bare original.
- Butter quantity"A small piece" on each half is around half a teaspoon, so about 2 tablespoons in total for twelve halves, plus more for the tin. The crumbs need the fat; skimping gives a dusty result.
- PipsRemove the seeds and the watery gel with a teaspoon but keep the inner walls intact, or the shells collapse in the tin.
- VesselA "well-buttered tin" is any shallow baking tin or gratin dish. Packing the halves tightly together probably helps them support each other as they soften.
- YieldTwelve halves, serving four to six as a side dish or a light supper course. Eaten cold they firm up considerably and make a decent picnic dish.
Cassell's arranges tomatoes as a matter of course by the late nineteenth century, but that was a relatively recent change in British cooking: the tomato is often said to have been grown mainly ornamentally and eaten with suspicion in Britain during the eighteenth century, though it was in fact both grown and cooked there and appears in English cookery books well before 1800. What is clear is that it became a common vegetable through the kitchen garden and greenhouse trade during the Victorian period. "Au gratin" here carries its older, broader sense of a dish finished with crumbs and butter rather than the cheese-sauced casserole the phrase suggests now, and the note that they may be eaten hot or cold suggests such a dish could reappear on the cold table the next day.