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Devilled Tomatoes
3 tomatoes Salt and pepper Flour Butter for sauteing 4 tablespoons butter 2 teaspoons powdered sugar 1 teaspoon mustard 1/4 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Yolk 1 "hard-boiled" egg 1 egg 2 tablepoons vinegar Wipe, peel, and cut tomatoes in slices. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and saute in butter. Place on a hot platter and pour over the dressing made by creaming the butter, adding dry ingredients, yolk of egg rubbed to a paste, egg beaten slightly, and vinegar, then cooking over hot water, stirring constantly until it thickens.
Mushrooms under Glass II 2 tablespoons butter 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice 1/4 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper 1/4 teaspoon finely chopped parsley Bread 1/4 cup heavy cream Sherry wine Mushrooms Cream the butter, add lemon juice drop by drop, salt, pepper, and parsley. Cut bread in circular piece three-eighths inch thick, then toast. Put one-half of the sauce on the under side of toast; put toast on a small baking-dish, pile mushroom caps cleaned and pealed in conical shape on toast, and pour over cream. Cover with glass and bake about twenty-five minutes, adding more cream if necessary. Just before serving add one teaspoon Sherry wine.
A plate of fried tomato slices under a warm, sharp mustard-and-vinegar butter sauce — essentially a devil sauce built like hollandaise. The sauce is the only difficult part.
- The hinge: cook the sauce gentlyThe dressing is an egg-thickened emulsion and will scramble if the water beneath it boils. Keep the water at a bare simmer, keep the bowl clear of it, and stir constantly until the sauce coats a spoon — around 160-170F. Pull it off the heat the moment it thickens.
- Mustard means dry mustardA teaspoon of "mustard" in this period is powdered English mustard, not a prepared jar mustard. Prepared mustard would add liquid and blunt the heat.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this date "powdered sugar" usually means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Either dissolves here; superfine is closer to the intent.
- Choose firm tomatoesSlices need to hold together through peeling, dredging and sauteing. Use firm, barely ripe tomatoes cut about half an inch thick; very ripe summer fruit will collapse in the pan.
- PeelingDrop the tomatoes in boiling water for 15-20 seconds and into cold water, and the skins slip off. Cutting the peel away with a knife wastes a good deal of flesh.
- FryingMedium-high heat and a hot pan, in batches, so the flour crust browns before the tomato weeps. Crowding steams them into mush.
- The hard-boiled yolkRub it through a fine sieve rather than mashing with a fork. Any lump left in it will show as a grainy speck in the finished sauce.
- YieldThree tomatoes serve three to four as a side dish. The sauce is best made while the tomatoes fry and served at once; it will not reheat.
Anything "devilled" in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery meant sharpened with mustard, cayenne and something acid — the term is generally traced to English usage of the late 1700s and was applied indiscriminately to kidneys, bones, biscuits, eggs and, here, tomatoes. Frying tomato slices in butter with a rich sauce poured over was one of many treatments cookbooks of this period offered beyond stewing. The dressing is a hot emulsified butter sauce of the same family as hollandaise, given body here by the hard yolk rubbed to a paste.