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TOMATOES, STUFFED (another way)
Take six or eight ripe red tomatoes of equal size. Cut off the tops and the green parts round them, and scoop out the insides. Press the pulp through a sieve, and mix with it a little salt and cayenne, two ounces of butter broken into little pieces, and two heaped table-spoonfuls of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Half a dozen finely-minced stewed mushrooms may be added or not. Fill the tomatoes with the mixture, and bake in a moderate oven, or fry them in oil until done enough. Before serving, brown them by holding a salamander or hot iron over them for a minute. Send brown gravy to table in the dish with them. Any good forcemeat that is liked may be used to stuff tomatoes. The remains of game or poultry minced finely, mixed with herbs and bread-crumbs, seasoned, and bound together with yolk of egg will answer excellently. Time to bake the tomatoes, ten to twelve minutes; to fry them, eight minutes. Probable cost, tomatoes, 2d. to 6d. per pound. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A straightforward Victorian vegetable dish that needs only a few translations, most of them about the filling's texture and the finishing colour.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F (175C). The tomatoes want to soften without collapsing, so a hotter oven works against you.
- The hinge: dry the pulpSieved tomato pulp is mostly water, and stirred straight into crumbs and butter it produces a filling that weeps out and floods the dish. Reduce the pulp in a pan until it is thick and jammy before mixing, or increase the crumbs until the mixture holds its shape on a spoon.
- Crumbs"Finely-grated bread-crumbs" means dry crumbs grated from stale bread, closer to fine dried crumbs than to the soft fresh crumbs a food processor gives. Dried crumbs absorb the pulp; fresh ones turn to paste.
- Two ounces of butterFour tablespoons, or 55 g, for six to eight tomatoes. Broken small so it melts through the filling rather than pooling.
- SalamanderThe Victorian salamander was an iron plate on a handle, heated red and held above food to colour the top. Thirty seconds to a minute under a hot grill or broiler does the same job.
- TimingTen to twelve minutes suits small, thin-skinned tomatoes. Modern beefsteak or vine tomatoes of any size will want 20 to 30 minutes at 350F; take them out when the sides yield to a spoon but still stand up.
- Frying them"Fry them in oil" most likely means shallow-frying in a pan rather than deep-frying. Baking is the more reliable route, and the fried version will not hold its shape if the filling is wet.
- The forcemeat variationMinced leftover game or poultry bound with raw egg yolk is fine here because it goes into the oven, but it needs the longer bake to set the yolk through and reheat the meat properly. Ten minutes will not do it.
- Yield and servingSix to eight tomatoes serve five or six as a side or a light course. The brown gravy sent to table with them is a plain meat gravy; it turns the dish into a supper accompaniment rather than a salad.
Cassell's was compiling at a moment when the tomato had only recently stopped being an oddity on British tables. Long grown in England as the "love apple" and treated with suspicion well into the nineteenth century, it entered general cookery through the Mediterranean and, particularly, through French kitchen practice. Stuffing and baking a hollowed vegetable was standard technique of the period, applied to marrows, cucumbers and onions alike, and the closing lines here are pure Victorian household economy: any good forcemeat will do, and yesterday's game or poultry is the obvious candidate. The costing in pence per pound, which Cassell's attaches to nearly every entry, marks the tomato as still a slightly expensive item.