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Pepper and Salt (One tablespoonful)
One tablespoonful of Bread-crumbs.
Cut the centre from the tomatoes, and, without breaking them, squeeze the juice or water out; season each one with a little pepper and salt. Put all the chopped ingredients into a sauté-pan, and stir over the fire, with the butter, until they are cooked, but not burnt; then add the brown sauce, the bread-crumbs, the nutmeg, and a little seasoning. Fill each tomato with the mixture, and sprinkle over each a little browned crumbs, in which has been mixed the Parmesan cheese.
About ten minutes in a moderate oven will suffice to cook them; they should be quite tender, but not broken.
This is the method half of a stuffed-tomato savoury; the page has been split so that the ingredient list survives only as fragments (the tablespoon of breadcrumbs, the butter, brown sauce, nutmeg and Parmesan are all named in passing). Working backwards from the instructions gives you everything you need.
- What the "chopped ingredients" wereThe list is lost, so this is reconstruction rather than fact: in a savoury of this date the filling would most likely be the scooped-out tomato centres with finely chopped mushroom, shallot or onion, and possibly ham or bacon. Chop everything fine enough that the filling holds together rather than falling out in lumps.
- Brown sauceNot bottled brown sauce. This means espagnole or a reduced meat gravy, used a spoonful at a time purely to bind. Two tablespoons of a thick demi-glace, or well-reduced beef stock, does the same job; too much and the filling slumps.
- Moderate oven350F/180C. Ten minutes at that heat is right for tomatoes that have already had their filling cooked in the pan — everything is simply being heated through and the crumb topping browned.
- Draining the tomatoesThe instruction to squeeze the water out without breaking them is the hinge of the dish. Salt the hollowed shells and leave them cut-side down for ten minutes; residual juice is what turns the crumb crust to paste and collapses the walls in the oven.
- Browned crumbsThe topping crumbs are dried and coloured separately — spread fresh crumbs on a tray in a low oven until sandy and pale gold, then mix with grated Parmesan. Raw crumbs will not brown in ten minutes at 350F.
- Sauté-panA wide, shallow pan, with straight or sloping sides. The width matters here: the chopped filling needs to lose its moisture by evaporation, not stew.
- Yield and servingNo quantity survives in the fragment; scale the filling to however many tomatoes you hollow out, allowing one or two per person. As a savoury these came at the end of the meal, after the sweet; today they serve better as a first course or alongside roast meat, and they want to be eaten hot but not scalding.
Savouries were the small, sharply seasoned dishes that closed a Victorian and Edwardian dinner after the sweet course, a British habit that puzzled French cooks and never crossed the Channel. Anchovy, cheese, marrow, mushroom and devilled things dominated the category, and stuffed tomatoes fit it neatly: hot, savoury, faintly piquant with nutmeg and Parmesan, and served in a single small portion. The tomato itself had only recently become an everyday British vegetable, and growing in the Lea Valley and around Worthing is generally credited with making them cheaper and more reliably available towards the end of the nineteenth century, and cookery books of the following decades put them to work in soups, sauces and stuffed forms like this one. The reliance on a spoonful of brown sauce to bind the filling gives the dish its depth.