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Tomatoes Baked with Eggs
Select 6 or 8 firm tomatoes of uniform and medium size, scald and peel them. Scoop out a small portion of the inside, leaving sufficient thickness to keep the shape well. Chop fine 1 small onion and fry it until a light brown in a tablespoonful of butter, add to it 1 cupful of fine bread crumbs, the tomato pulp and juice taken out of the tomatoes, 1 teaspoonful of finely chopped parsley, and salt and pepper. Cook all together until well heated. Pack the tomatoes closely together in a shallow baking-pan of granite or earthenware, fill the centres with the mixture, and if any remains put it around the tomatoes. Bake in a hot oven twenty or thirty minutes, then break carefully over the top of each 1 egg, return to the oven and bake until the egg is set. On taking it out of the oven shake a little salt and pepper over the tops of the eggs, and serve at once. This makes a hearty dish for a Sunday night supper, or for lunch.
A straightforward stuffed-tomato supper dish that needs only a few translations. The one thing to watch is the second bake: the eggs go on top only after the tomatoes are nearly done, and they need only minutes.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in period usage is roughly 400-450F. The tomatoes bake 20-30 minutes, then the eggs go on; the recipe says only to bake until the egg is set, which will be a matter of minutes.
- Don't overbake the eggsPull the pan when the whites are just opaque and the yolks still tremble. Carryover heat in the tomato shells keeps cooking them on the way to the table.
- Choosing tomatoesUse firm tomatoes rather than very ripe ones. The recipe calls for medium, uniform fruit; scoop the cavity wide enough that a whole egg will sit in it without running over the sides.
- Scalding and peelingThirty seconds in boiling water, then into cold, and the skins slip off. Score an X at the base first.
- Bread crumbs"Fine bread crumbs" here probably means soft crumbs from day-old bread rather than the dry canister kind, which may absorb the tomato juice and go pasty.
- Granite ware"Granite" is enamelled steel, the speckled cookware of the period. Any shallow ceramic or enamelled dish that holds the tomatoes snugly upright will do; packing them tight is what keeps them from collapsing.
- YieldSix to eight tomatoes with an egg each serves four generously as a supper dish, or six alongside toast and a salad.