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TOMATOES (au Gratin)
Slice some tomatoes, lay them in a flat dish, buttered and covered with bread-crumbs, then strew some chopped mushrooms over, with a little minced ham. If the flavour of onions. is liked, a small chopped onion may be added. Moisten with a little brown sauce, cover with more crumbs, add a few bits of butter, and bake in a quick oven to a nice brown.
TOMATOES (au Gratin), another way.
Dissolve an ounce of fresh butter in a stewpan, and mix half an ounce of flour smoothly with it. Stir it with a wooden spoon over a gentle fire for two minutes, then add very gradually three-quarters of a pint of good stock. Let it boil gently till it is reduced to rather less than half a pint. Put in with it a table-spoonful of chopped onion, three table-spoonfuls of finely-shredded parsley, and a little pepper and salt, and boil it quickly for ten minutes. Take eight or ten large ripe tomatoes. Slice off the stalks and the part that adheres to them, and make in the top a round hole the size of a shilling. Scoop out the seeds through this, and fill their place with the prepared sauce. Set the fruit carefully in a baking-tin, the stalk end uppermost, with two ounces of butter, and sprinkle bread-crumbs lightly over them. Put them in a brisk oven, and bake them for ten minutes. Serve very hot. Time to make the stuffing, about one hour. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
Two versions of the same idea: a sliced tomato gratin, and whole tomatoes hollowed and filled with a parsley-onion velouté. Both rely on a very hot oven to brown crumbs before the tomatoes collapse.
- Oven heatA "quick" or "brisk" oven is a hot one, somewhere around 400-450F (200-230C). Anything cooler and the tomatoes weep before the crumbs colour, leaving a pale, soupy dish.
- Imperial measuresThe pints here are imperial: three-quarters of a pint is 15 fl oz (about 425 ml), reduced to rather less than half a pint, roughly 8-9 fl oz. An ounce of butter to half an ounce of flour is a slack roux, deliberately so, since the reduction does most of the thickening.
- Brown sauceA roux-based brown sauce made with meat stock, of the espagnole type. A well-reduced beef stock with a little tomato paste, or a good jarred demi-glace loosened with stock, stands in for it in the first version.
- The size of a shillingA shilling was about 24 mm, so a hole a shade under an inch across, scooped out with a small spoon or melon baller. Leave the shoulders of the tomato intact or the shell buckles in the oven.
- Bake timeTen minutes browns the crumbs but will not soften a large whole tomato; 20-25 minutes in a hot oven is closer to the mark, with the crumbs added partway through if they threaten to burn. The first, sliced version is given no time at all; 15-20 minutes should do it.
- Salting the shellsNot in the original, but worth doing: salt the hollowed tomatoes and invert them for 15 minutes before filling, since watery fruit will slacken the filling.
- Dish and quantity"A flat dish" is a shallow gratin or baking dish; the shallower the better, since the point is surface area for crust. The second version is given as sufficient for six or seven as part of a larger meal, closer to four as a main course.
- The cost line1s 3d is the late nineteenth-century price for the second dish, printed so a housekeeper could budget. It has no modern equivalent worth quoting and should be read as period detail.
Au gratin in nineteenth-century English cookery meant simply a browned crust, usually of breadcrumbs and butter, formed in a hot oven or under a salamander; the modern association with cheese and cream came later, and neither recipe here uses cheese at all. Tomatoes reached English tables late and cautiously, still often called "love apples" in the early part of the century and, by tradition at least, regarded with suspicion as a nightshade, but by the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled they were common enough to warrant an entry of their own. The second version, with its stuffing of reduced stock, onion and a great deal of parsley, is a straightforwardly French treatment of an ingredient the English had adopted through French cooking, and the instruction to set the fruit stalk end uppermost in the tin is the practical heart of it: the tomato is being used as its own cup.