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Stuffed Tomatoes (Choose large smooth tomatoes)
Choose large, smooth tomatoes, slice off the stem ends and with the fingers scoop out the seeds. Put a cup of stale bread crumbs in a bowl, add a tablespoonful of chopped onion, half teaspoonful of salt, a dash of pepper, and a tablespoonful of melted butter. Fill the tomatoes with this stuffing, heaping it in the centre. Place them in a baking-pan, and bake in a quick oven thirty minutes. Lift them carefully with a cake turner, place on a hot dish and serve.
A plain baked stuffed tomato from the era when bread crumbs did the work of both filler and topping. The only real decisions are oven heat and how much moisture you leave inside the shells.
- Quick ovenRead "quick" as roughly 400-425F. Thirty minutes at that heat should brown the crumb top; at 350F you are more likely to get soft, pale tomatoes sitting in their own juice.
- Stale bread crumbsThis means crumbs torn or grated from day-old bread, not the fine dry canister sort, which packs too densely and turns pasty. A cup of coarse fresh-ish crumbs from good bread is what the recipe assumes.
- Drain the shellsAfter scooping the seeds, salt the insides lightly and invert them on a rack for ten minutes. The original skips this, and undrained tomatoes water down the stuffing and stick to the pan.
- Raw onionA tablespoon of raw chopped onion may still taste noticeably sharp after a half-hour bake. Softening it in the butter first, then stirring butter and onion into the crumbs, gives a rounder result without changing the recipe's character.
- The butter is the seasoningOne tablespoon melted butter per cup of crumbs is the whole fat content, so it should be tossed through thoroughly rather than poured in one spot. Dry patches of crumb will scorch before the tomato is done.
- Pan and liftingUse a shallow pan just large enough that the tomatoes brace each other upright, and butter it or line it. A "cake turner" is a wide metal spatula, which is still the right tool for moving them intact.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number. A cup of crumb stuffing will fill perhaps two to four large tomatoes depending on how deeply they are hollowed and how high the stuffing is heaped.
Stuffed tomatoes belong to a period when the tomato was an ordinary American garden vegetable, abundant enough in late summer that cookbooks carried many ways to use it. Bread-crumb stuffings of this sort stretched a small amount of butter, used up stale loaves, and turned a vegetable into something more substantial on the plate. The instruction to bake in a quick oven reflects a coal or wood range judged by hand and habit rather than a dial, and the direction to serve on a hot dish is a reminder of how quickly food cooled in an unheated dining room.