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Tomatoes and Mushrooms
Cut some large tomatoes into halves, scoop out some of the pulp, and mix it with ten or twelve chopped button mushrooms, two ounces of bread-crumbs, pepper and salt to taste, and an ounce of butter. Fill the tomatoes with this mixture, and bake in a moderate oven.
A short entry that assumes more than it says: no oven time, no quantity of tomatoes, no dish preparation. The quantities given suit about six large tomato halves.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as about 350F/180C. Baking mainly softens the tomato shells and browns the crumbs; 20 to 25 minutes should be enough, though the recipe gives no time.
- Button mushroomsSmall young mushrooms with tight, unopened caps; ten or twelve would amount to only a few ounces. Modern white or cremini mushrooms of similar weight will do; chop them fine so they cook through in the short bake.
- Cook the mushrooms firstThis is the hinge. Raw chopped mushrooms release a great deal of water into the crumbs and leave the filling sodden. Sweat them in the butter until the pan is dry, then combine with the crumbs and reserved pulp.
- Bread-crumbsTwo ounces is about a cup of fresh soft crumbs, not dried packaged crumbs, which absorb far more liquid. Fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf give the loose texture intended.
- The scooped pulpTake out the seeds and watery core and keep only the firm flesh, chopped. Adding the seed jelly back is what turns the stuffing to porridge.
- Salting the shellsA light sprinkle of salt inside the hollowed halves, left to drain upside down for ten minutes, draws off enough juice to keep the tomatoes from collapsing in the dish.
- YieldEnough filling for three large tomatoes halved, serving three as a side or two as a light supper dish with bread.
Stuffed tomatoes appear across late nineteenth-century English cookery books at just the point when the tomato stopped being a curiosity of the hothouse and became a market vegetable — Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, generally dated to the later nineteenth century and reissued for decades after, carries a long run of tomato entries that would have been unthinkable in an English domestic book fifty years earlier. The pairing with mushrooms and buttered crumbs is often described as the standard Victorian formula for turning any hollowed vegetable into a served dish: the crumb-and-butter forcemeat is said to have been the workhorse stuffing of the period, applied equally to marrows, onions and cucumbers. The recipe names no number of tomatoes and no baking time.