Home › Vegetables › Tomatoes with Spaghetti Stuffing
Tomatoes with Spaghetti Stuffing
Scoop the inside from eight tomatoes.
To one and a half cups of cooked spaghetti add the tomato pulp, one tablespoon of butter, pepper, salt and a few drops of onion juice. Fill each tomato cover with buttered crumbs and bake till brown. Instead of preparing the spaghetti, a left-over of spaghetti or macaroni slightly chopped may be very savorily utilized for this dish.
A leftover-pasta dish from an era when nothing cooked went to waste. The original gives no oven temperature and no time, so the notes below fill in what a period cook would have taken for granted.
- Oven and timingThe recipe gives neither temperature nor time, only "bake till brown." A moderate oven, in modern terms somewhere around 375F, for roughly 20 to 25 minutes should brown the crumbs while the tomato walls slump slightly but still hold their shape; a very hot oven risks the shells giving way before the tops colour.
- Drain the shellsAfter scooping, salt the hollowed tomatoes lightly and stand them upside down for 10 to 15 minutes. Otherwise they weep into the filling and the stuffing turns soupy.
- The pulp needs reducingRaw tomato pulp is mostly water, and the recipe adds it straight to the spaghetti. Chopping it and cooking it down in the butter for a few minutes first will give a firmer, less watery filling.
- Onion juiceA standard flavouring of the period, made by grating an onion and pressing out the liquid through cloth. A teaspoon of very finely grated onion, or a small amount of shallot softened in the butter, does the same job.
- Buttered crumbsFresh soft breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter until evenly coated, roughly one tablespoon butter to half a cup crumbs. Fine dry packaged crumbs colour much faster and are more likely to darken before the tomatoes are done.
- Spaghetti lengthThe recipe calls for chopping only in the leftover variation, but short lengths pack into a tomato far better than full strands, which tend to drag the filling out.
- Support in the panBake the tomatoes close together in a dish just large enough to hold them, so they prop each other up as they soften.
- YieldEight stuffed tomatoes serve four as a side dish, or three to four as a light supper with bread and salad.
Stuffed tomatoes appear all through American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, once the tomato had shed its lingering reputation as suspect and become a summer staple. This version belongs to the thrift tradition of the period: the closing line, offering leftover spaghetti or macaroni "slightly chopped", is the real point of the recipe. Dry pasta was widely available in American groceries by this period and macaroni was generally treated as a plain, economical starch rather than an Italian speciality, so a cook might well have some left over. Filling a vegetable with yesterday's starch and crowning it with buttered crumbs was a familiar move of the period's kitchen economy, applied equally to peppers, onions and squash.