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Deviled Tomatoes
For this dish use six large, solid tomatoes. Wipe, peel and cut in slices half an inch thick. Dust with pepper, salt and flour and saute in brown butter.
Lift each slice carefully with a skimmer when cooked and lay on a hot platter, Pour over them a sauce made as follows:
Cream half a cup of butter, add four teaspoons of powdered sugar, two teaspoons of mustard, half a teaspoon of salt, a dust of cayenne, the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs rubbed to a paste, two eggs beaten slightly and a quarter of a cup of vinegar. While the tomatoes saute put the sauce to cook in a bowl set in a teakettle-the double boiler is too hot for it and pour when thickened over the sauted tomatoes.
A skillet of floured tomato slices under a warm mustard-butter sauce that is essentially a hollandaise gone sharp. The sauce is the whole dish, and it is the part most likely to go wrong.
- The hinge: gentle heat for the sauceSetting a bowl over the mouth of a steaming kettle is an improvised low-temperature bain-marie, and the recipe is explicit that a double boiler runs too hot. Use a bowl over barely steaming water, off the boil, and stir constantly until it coats a spoon at about 175F; direct or vigorous heat will scramble the two whole eggs into curds.
- "Mustard" means dry mustard"Mustard" most likely means dry mustard -- Two teaspoons of powdered English or Colman's-style mustard rather than prepared jarred mustard, which would loosen the sauce; the recipe does not specify, though the vinegar is already accounted for separately.
- Powdered sugarConfectioners' sugar in modern terms; period powdered sugar was generally just finely ground sugar, without the cornstarch usual in modern confectioners' sugar. Four teaspoons of granulated sugar works and dissolves in the warm butter.
- Brown butterCook the butter until the milk solids are nut-brown before the tomatoes go in, and keep the pan hot enough that the floured slices set a crust rather than stewing.
- Peeling the tomatoesDrop them into boiling water for 15 to 30 seconds and into ice water; the skins slip off. Half-inch slices from six large tomatoes will need several batches in a 12-inch pan.
- A skimmerA flat perforated skimmer or spider. A wide fish spatula does the same job; the slices are fragile once cooked and will not survive tongs.
- Sauce quantity and yieldHalf a cup of butter plus two hard-cooked yolks and two whole eggs makes a generous amount of rich sauce for six tomatoes. It serves six as a side, and half the sauce is enough for most tastes; it does not reheat, so make it to order.
To "devil" a dish in nineteenth-century English and American cookery meant to season it aggressively with mustard and cayenne, a usage that goes back to deviled bones and deviled kidneys in Regency England and had spread to eggs, ham, crab and, as here, vegetables by the time this book was compiled. The sauce is a mustard-sharpened cousin of the emulsified butter sauces then entering American home kitchens, thickened with both raw and hard-cooked yolks in the older manner rather than with cream or flour. Fried tomato slices were an established American vegetable dish long before green tomatoes became their famous form, and the instruction to improvise a water bath over a teakettle is a good reminder of what the kitchen range of the period actually offered: plenty of fierce heat, and very little control at the low end.