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French Tomatoes
Scald and peel 6 small tomatoes of the solid-meated kind; the peach or Italian tomatoes are nice for this way of cooking. Make a cream sauce by rubbing together 1 tablespoonful of butter and 1 of flour; add 1 cupful of hot milk, and stir over the fire until boiling; add salt and pepper to taste; add only 1 drop or 2 of onion juice, and just a dash of celery salt. Put 1 tablespoonful of the sauce in the bottom of a ramakin or custard cup, then drop in a tomato and cover with the sauce. Sprinkle over the top bread crumbs seasoned well with butter. Stand the cups in a pan containing boiling water and bake half an hour in a moderately hot oven. Serve hot in the cups, placed on a small plate.
A simple baked tomato in cream sauce, cooked in individual cups set in a water bath. The recipe is sound as written; a few terms need translating.
- Oven temperature"Moderately hot" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 375-400F. The water bath buffers the heat, so the setting is not critical.
- RamakinA ramakin (ramekin) or custard cup of roughly 4 to 6 ounces. Each holds one tomato with sauce around it.
- Tomato choiceThe recipe asks for the "solid-meated kind"; "Italian" corresponds closely to modern plum or Roma tomatoes. "Peach" was a named variety of the period. Large slicing tomatoes shed too much water and thin the sauce.
- Onion juiceGrate a cut onion on a fine rasp and use the liquid that collects. Two drops is genuinely all that is meant \flflavour note rather than an onion presence. Grated onion pulp is too coarse a substitute.
- The sauceThis is a thin white sauce: 1 tablespoon each butter and flour to a cup of milk. The original rubs the butter and flour together raw and relies on stirring it to a full boil with the hot milk to thicken and cook out the flour.
- Water bathThe recipe says only a pan of boiling water; the usual practice is to bring it partway up the cups. Starting with boiling water shortens the time the cups take to come up to heat.
- Crumb toppingThe crumbs may colour less than in a dry oven because of the steam from the water bath. If more colour is wanted, finish briefly under the broiler.
- YieldSix cups, one tomato each \fa first course or a side dish for six. The cup of sauce is just enough; do not stretch it further.
History: "French" in American cookbooks of this period often signalled refinement rather than French origin -- individual portions and a cream sauce read as hotel and restaurant style. Baking in single-serving cups set in water borrows a custard technique and applies it to a savoury dish. The seasoning here -- celery salt and a drop or two of onion juice -- flavours the dish without any visible trace of onion or celery.