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Tomatoes Stuffed
Cut a thin slice off the tops of eight large, firm tomatoes and with a spoon carefully lift out the pulp. Rub it through a sieve, discarding the seeds.
To the juice add half a cup of stale bread crumbs, two tablespoons of melted butter, a dust of salt, pepper and paprika and half a teaspoon of minced parsley.
Stuff the tomato shells with this, put a bit of butter on top of each and set in a hot oven for ten minutes.
A plain baked stuffed tomato that depends entirely on how wet the filling is. The pulp gives up far more liquid than half a cup of crumbs can absorb, so the one adjustment worth making is at the stove, before anything goes in the shells.
- The hinge: reduce the pulpSieved tomato pulp is mostly water. Simmer it down in a small pan until it is thick and jammy before stirring in the crumbs, or the filling will slump and the shells will sit in a puddle.
- "A hot oven"In books of this period that is usually given as roughly 400-450F. Ten minutes at that heat will warm the filling and brown the butter, but the shells will still be firm; 15-20 minutes gives tomatoes that hold their shape and taste cooked.
- Stale bread crumbsCrumbs torn from day-old bread and dried, not the fine sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Commercial dried crumbs absorb differently and go pasty; if that is all you have, use about a third of a cup and check the texture.
- Salting and draining the shellsAfter hollowing them, salt the insides lightly and stand them upside down on a rack for 10 minutes. It draws out water that would otherwise collect under the stuffing.
- PaprikaThe paprika called for in American kitchens of this period was the mild sweet sort, used largely for colour on top. Smoked Spanish paprika, long-established in Spain but not a fixture of American home cooking then, will dominate the dish.
- Choice of tomatoLarge, firm and slightly underripe is right. Fully ripe heirlooms collapse in the oven; a beefsteak or a large round slicing tomato holds its walls.
- Baking dishSet them close together in a shallow dish or a muffin tin so they brace one another. Loose on a sheet pan they tend to split and tip.
- YieldEight tomatoes, serving four as a side dish or eight as part of a larger vegetable course.
Stuffed tomatoes are common in American general cookbooks from the 1880s onward, and the version here is the thriftiest form of the idea: the tomato is emptied, its own pulp bound with stale bread, and the whole thing returned to its skin. That logic of using the vegetable as its own dish and its own sauce runs through the vegetable chapters of the period, alongside stuffed peppers, stuffed onions and stuffed cucumbers. Fresh tomatoes were seasonal, abundant in late summer, so recipes clustered around ways to make eight tomatoes into a course. The paprika is a small marker of date: it is generally said to have spread through American home cooking in the early twentieth century, usually as a colouring for pale or baked dishes rather than for heat.