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Vegetables: Sprinkle
Wipe 4 tomatoes, pare, and cut in 3 slices. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge generously with flour, and sauté in butter, first on one side, then on the other. Remove to a hot serving dish and pour over them the following sauce: Melt 2½ tablespoonfuls butter, add 21 teaspoonfuls flour, and stir until blended; then pour on, while stirring or beating constantly, 1 cupful milk. Bring to the boiling point, season with salt and pepper.
Tomato Surprise. 6 tomatoes, 2 hard-boiled eggs, 2 tablespoonfuls red pepper, 2 tablespoonfuls green pepper, 1 shallot, 1 clove garlic, 4 anchovies.
MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK Wipe the tomatoes, cut a slice from the stem end of each, scoop out the inside, invert, and stand thirty minutes. Add the eggs, peppers, shallot, garlic and anchovies finely chopped.
Moisten with mayonnaise dressing.
Fill the tomato cases with the mixture, mask with mayonnaise, and garnish with anchovies. Serve as a first course at dinner.
Broiled Tomatoes.
Wipe and cut tomatoes in halves crosswise; then cut a thin slice from the rounding part of each. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs again, place in a well-buttered broiler, and broil six to eight minutes.
Baked Tomatoes.
Wipe 6 smooth, medium-sized tomatoes and remove a thin slice from the stem end of each. Take out the seeds and pulp and drain off most of the liquid. Add to the pulp an equal quantity of buttered cracker crumbs, and season with salt, pepper, and a few drops of onion juice. Refill the tomatoes with the mixture, place in a buttered pan, sprinkle with buttered cracker crumbs, and bake twenty minutes in a hot oven.
Deviled Tomatoes. 4 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 teaspoonfuls powdered sugar, 1 teaspoonful mustard, teaspoonful salt, Few grains cayenne, Yolk hard-boiled egg, 1 egg slightly beaten, 2 tablespoonfuls vinegar.
Wipe, peel, and cut tomatoes in slices. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and sauté in butter. Remove to a hot serving dish, and pour over a dressing made from the above ingredients. Cook over hot water, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens.
Fried Corn.
Scrape corn carefully from the cob.
Cut through the center of the kernel, so that all the pulp and juices may be extracted without the removal of the hulls. Sift a little flour over the corn, with salt and pepper to taste.
Place some slices of bacon over the fire in frying pan, until all the grease has been extracted. Remove the meat and put the corn in the pan to fry in the bacon fat until it becomes delicately brown and tender; it must be stirred constantly for fifteen on twenty minutes.
Corn Patties Garnished with Husks.
Green corn, 3 eggs, 1 cupful fine cracker crumbs, teaspoonful sugar, Pepper and salt.
This calls for enough green corn ..fter it has been grated to make a pint. To the corn add 2 eggs and the cracker crumbs, season with salt and pepper-about + teaspoonful pepper and a teaspoonful salt. Add the sugar and form the mixture into cakes about the size of a large oyster; then roll in egg and afterwards in cracker crumbs. Wash the corn husks and shred the ends with a fork for about two inches. Arrange them on a platter with the fringe hanging over the sides. Cook the patties in smoking-hot lard until brown and crisp, then heap in a mound in the center of the platter and serve at Once.-MARIA PARLOA, Vegetarian Sausages. 1½ cupfuls Lima beans, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 teaspoonful salt, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce.
Soak the beans over night, cook in salted water until soft. Drain perfectly dry, then squeeze the pulp through a potato ricer. Beat in the butter and seasonings. If not moist VEGETABLES enough, add a beaten egg or as much of it as required, make the paste so soft it can be rolled into croquettes.
Shape like small sausages, dip in beaten egg and flour, then fry in butter, rolling the sausages over in the pan till brown on all sides. Serve with cold slaw.
Beans à la Bretonne (French recipe). pint haricot beans, 4 large onions, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 cupful brown stock, Dash Sauce, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful finely minced parsley.
Boil the beans till tender; slice the onions thin, and fry in butter till brown. Put the beans and onions in a stewpan and add the stock, pepper, salt, and parsley. Serve very hot.
French Beans à la Poulette (French recipe).
Put young, tender beans in a stewpan with plenty of salted water.
When cooked, blanch, drain, and return to stewpan with a bit of butter. Sprinkle in a tablespoonful flour; let them stew a few minutes, but do not allow them to brown; add a tablespoonful stock, minced parsley, and green onions with salt and pepper.
Let them come to a boil, stir well, thicken with yolks 2 eggs, beaten in a little cream. Just before serving, add juice of a lemon.
Curried Onion.
Fry sliced onions in butter or fat; salt and pepper, then add 1 teaspoonful curry, raw eggs, and a few drops lemon juice. Serve hot.
A run of tomato, corn and bean dishes from a period when "vegetables" meant a separate course with its own sauces. The methods hold up; several quantities and oven cues need translating.
- Oven and broiler settingsThe recipe says only "hot oven," which in period usage corresponds to roughly 400-450F; the book gives no temperatures of its own. Broiled tomatoes at six to eight minutes assume a hot broiler close to the element; check at five, since crumbed halves scorch before the flesh softens.
- The white sauce proportionsThe "21 teaspoonfuls flour" is plainly a misprint. Matching the flour to the 2½ tablespoonfuls butter, with 1 cupful milk beaten in, gives a thick pouring white sauce rather than a thin one; reduce both fat and flour if you want it looser.
- Deviled Tomatoes has no tomato countThe ingredient list gives only the dressing. Four to six medium tomatoes will take that quantity of sauce. The dressing is a cooked mustard dressing in the boiled-dressing family and must be made over hot water, never direct heat, or the egg curdles.
- Mayonnaise in Tomato SurpriseThis is served cold and never heated, so the dressing carries whatever the eggs carry. Use commercial mayonnaise, or pasteurized eggs if making it yourself. Anchovies and shallot mean the filling needs little added salt.
- Scraping cornThe instruction to cut through the center of each kernel and press out the pulp leaves the tough hulls on the cob. The patties recipe calls instead for grating the corn, which yields much the same thing. A corn cutter or the back of a knife works; the yield is milky and thick, not whole kernels.
- Corn patty seasoningThe pepper quantity is unreadable in the original; a quarter teaspoonful pepper to a teaspoonful salt suits a pint of grated corn. Frying in "smoking-hot lard" means deep fat around 375F; any neutral frying oil substitutes directly.
- Husk garnishThe shredded husks are decoration only and are not eaten. Wash them as the recipe directs.
- Beans"Haricot beans" here means dried white beans, not green beans; a pint dry yields roughly 5-6 cups cooked and needs overnight soaking. The Lima beans for the sausages want the same treatment. "French beans" in the poulette recipe, by contrast, are fresh green beans.
- Blanching, old senseBlanching -- in the poulette recipe "blanch" comes after the beans are already cooked, so it most likely means refreshing them in cold water to set the colour rather than parboiling; the word carried both senses at the time. Skip it if you are serving immediately.
- Curried OnionThe raw eggs go into the hot pan with the onions and set as they are stirred, giving a soft scramble. The recipe gives no egg count, so judge by the quantity of onion.
These pages sit at the point where American home cooking absorbed the tomato wholesale. Widely eaten only from the mid-nineteenth century onward in the United States, by 1900 the tomato had acquired a full repertoire of genteel treatments — stuffed cases as a first course, crumbed and broiled, sautéed under a white sauce — that mirror what cookery schools were teaching with oysters and sweetbreads. The attributions are telling: Maria Parloa was among the first teachers and principals at the Boston Cooking School and among the most quoted authorities of the era. So does the branded Tabasco, which appears twice by name; McIlhenny's sauce, made in Louisiana since the 1860s, was one of the first proprietary condiments common enough that a recipe writer could assume a bottle in the pantry. The vegetarian Lima bean sausage belongs to the same decades, when meat-substitute cookery was moving from health-reform circles into general household books.