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Tomato Farcies
Scoop out the tomato pulp, leaving the shells, and fill with a stuffing made from half a cup of sausage meat, four tablespoons of stale bread crumbs, one teaspoon of minced parsley, a shred of garlic, one teaspoon of tarragon vinegar and one teaspoon of finely minced onion. Set the tomatoes in a baking dish, cover with buttered bread crumbs and bake till chestnut brown. Just before sending to the table squeeze over them the juice of one lemon.
A compact French-style stuffed tomato with no oven temperature and no timing beyond a color cue. The points below fill in what the original assumes.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 375F, which is hot enough to brown the crumb topping while the sausage cooks through and slow enough that the shells do not collapse.
- The hinge: cook the sausage throughThe stuffing goes in raw, so the tomatoes are done when the filling reaches 160F at the center, not when the top looks right. "Chestnut brown" crumbs can appear in 20 minutes while the pork is still pink; expect 30 to 40 minutes for medium tomatoes, and check with a thermometer.
- "A shred of garlic"This means a sliver, not a clove: about a quarter of a clove finely minced, or a full clove if you want it to register.
- Sausage meatBulk pork sausage, uncased; period sausage meat was typically seasoned with little more than salt, pepper and sage. If you can only find links, slit the casings and use the meat. Half a cup is about 4 oz, enough to fill roughly four medium tomatoes.
- Stale bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn from day-old bread, not dry packaged crumbs, which will drink the tomato juices and turn pasty. For the topping, toss fresh crumbs with a tablespoon of melted butter.
- Prepare the shellsCut a lid from the stem end, scoop out the pulp and seeds, then salt the insides lightly and invert them for 15 minutes to drain. Undrained shells release enough liquid to steam the topping instead of browning it. Reserve the pulp for sauce or soup.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and easy to make by steeping a sprig in white wine vinegar for a week. Plain white wine vinegar plus a pinch of dried tarragon is a close stand-in.
- Yield and servingAbout four tomatoes, enough for four as a side or two as a light main. The lemon juice goes on just before serving rather than in the oven, and it lifts what is otherwise a rich, fatty filling.
Farci is simply French for stuffed, and stuffed tomatoes were established in French home cooking before American household books picked them up. The title's mixture of English "Tomato" with the French feminine plural "farcies" is a period marker: turn-of-the-century American cookery writing leaned hard on French vocabulary as a signal of refinement -- though tomates farcies is itself perfectly ordinary French. The recipe also shows how far the tomato had traveled: regarded with suspicion in parts of the English-speaking world in the early nineteenth century, it was by the later nineteenth century a common summer vegetable in American kitchens, cheap enough to hollow out and discard the middle of. Pork sausage, garlic, parsley and breadcrumbs is a filling of the general Provencal type.