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Stuffed Tomatoes
Choose large, smooth tomatoes. Cut a slice off the stem ends, and with your finger carefully scoop out the seeds. Put one cup of stale bread crumbs into a bowl, add to them a teaspoonful of chopped onion, a half teaspoonful of salt, a dash of cayenne, and moisten with a tablespoonful of melted butter. Fill the tomatoes with this stuffing, heaping it in the centre. Place the tomatoes in a granite baking pan, and bake in a quick oven thirty minutes. When done, take them up carefully with a cake turner, place on a heated dish, and serve.
This stuffing will fill six tomatoes.
To preserve the crispness and flavor of green vegetables for salads, throw them in ice water for an hour, then dry carefully on a soft towel, being careful not to bruise them, and then put in a cold place until wanted. Never mix any salad with the dressing until you are ready to serve it. Use the coldest of dishes to serve it on, and, if garnished properly, it is one of the most attractive and wholesome dishes on the table.
A simple crumb-stuffed tomato from a book built around cooking that does not overheat the kitchen. Two things need translation: the oven and the pan.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-450F; the term was never fixed. Thirty minutes at that heat suits large, firm tomatoes; smaller ones will collapse well before the time is up, so start checking at 20 minutes.
- Granite baking panGraniteware, the speckled enamel-on-steel common in kitchens of the period. Any enamelled, glass or ceramic dish works; avoid bare aluminium or cast iron, which react with the acid and can leave a metallic edge.
- Stale bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn or grated from day-old bread, not the fine dry crumbs sold in canisters. Dry commercial crumbs will drink the butter and bake into sand; if that is all you have, use about two-thirds of a cup and add a little more butter.
- The hinge: drain the shellsAfter scooping the seeds, salt the hollows lightly and stand them upside down for 15 minutes. The recipe assumes firm, less watery fruit than most supermarket tomatoes; skip this and the stuffing goes to paste and the tomatoes weep into the pan.
- Raw onionA teaspoonful of raw chopped onion has only half an hour to cook through and it will stay sharp. Sweating it in the tablespoon of butter first, then pouring butter and onion together over the crumbs, gives a rounder result and takes two minutes.
- CayenneA dash means a pinch, well under an eighth of a teaspoon. Cayenne strength varied from tin to tin, so season to taste.
- BrowningHeaped crumbs in a quick oven will colour fast. If the tops darken before the tomatoes soften, lay a sheet of foil loosely over them for the rest of the time.
- YieldSix tomatoes, as stated: a side dish for four to six, or a light lunch for three with bread and salad.
- The salad noteThe paragraph tacked on the end is a separate hint, not part of the recipe. The advice still holds: dry, chill, dress at the last moment; and crisping greens in ice water remains a reliable fix for limp lettuce.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to a small genre of late nineteenth-century American books devoted to summer cookery meals that could be got on the table without stoking a coal range all afternoon, and that would not sit heavily in July. Stuffed tomatoes were a natural fit: the tomato had gone from suspect novelty in the early 1800s to an ordinary garden crop by the 1880s, and a hollowed one made a ready container for the seasoned bread stuffing that would otherwise have gone into a fowl. The stuffing itself is thrift work stale bread, a spoonful of onion, butter, salt, cayenne and the same mixture appears across the period's cookbooks under a variety of headings. The tag about crisping salad greens in ice water is characteristic of these volumes too: instructions and household hints ran together on the page.