Home › The Principles of Cookery › Tomatoes and Rice
Tomatoes and Rice
Take six ripe tomatoes, free them from pips, and put them in a tin in the oven with a little butter to bake; baste them occasionally with a little butter. In the meantime boil half a pound of rice in a little stock or water, only sufficient for the rice to absorb the liquor. When this is done, pour on to the rice all the liquid and butter from the tin in which the tomatoes were cooked, stir it well, and add some pepper and salt. Put this on a dish, and serve the tomatoes on the rice with the red, unbroken side uppermost.
A straightforward baked tomato and rice side dish, written for cooks who were assumed to know the absorption method without being told the ratio. Two details need filling in: the oven heat and the amount of liquid for the rice.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Baked tomatoes of this kind want a moderate oven, around 350F, for 25 to 35 minutes — hot enough to concentrate them, gentle enough that the skins stay whole for serving.
- "A tin"A shallow metal baking tin or roasting pan, not a covered casserole. Set the tomatoes in a single layer with space between them so the juices reduce rather than stew.
- "Free them from pips"The original does not say how. One workable reading is to halve the tomatoes across and scoop out the seeds and watery gel with a teaspoon, leaving the halves intact; on that reading the instruction to serve them "red, unbroken side uppermost" implies the cut face goes down in the tin. Coring or slitting from the stem end would also answer the instruction.
- Rice quantitiesHalf a pound is about 1 1/4 cups of long-grain rice. The absorption method wants roughly twice its volume in stock — about 2 1/2 cups — brought to a boil, then covered and cooked on the lowest heat 15 to 18 minutes until the liquid is gone.
- ButterUnspecified in the original. About 2 oz (4 tablespoons) is enough to bake and baste six tomatoes and still leave buttery juices worth pouring over the rice, which is the whole point of the dish.
- StockThe recipe allows either stock or water, so stock is preferred rather than required. A good chicken or vegetable stock will give more flavour than water.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish, or four as a light supper course.
Cassell's places this among its plainer vegetable dishes at a moment when the tomato was still settling into the British kitchen. Long grown in England as an ornamental and eaten only cautiously into the early nineteenth century, it had become common enough by the later Victorian period to appear in general household dictionaries without explanation or apology. The construction here — a starch cooked dry, then enriched with the pan juices of something roasted separately — is a familiar Victorian economy, the same logic that produces dripping puddings. The insistence on serving the tomatoes whole and skin-side up is a reminder that these books were written for tables where a vegetable course was expected to be looked at as well as eaten.