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Tomato Farci
Put one layer of sliced tomatoes in the bottom of a baking-dish, then a layer of bread crumbs, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Then put in another layer of tomatoes, bread crumbs, and so continue until the dish is full, having the last layer crumbs. Put over the top a few bits of butter and bake in a quick oven twenty minutes. Serve in the dish in which baked.
A layered tomato scallop under a French name. It works if you control the moisture; otherwise the crumbs sink into a wet, pink mush.
- "Quick oven"Roughly 400-450F; the recipe itself gives no temperature. Twenty minutes at that heat browns the buttered crumb top while the tomato layers collapse into sauce. Any cooler and you risk steamed tomatoes with pale crumbs.
- The hinge: drain the tomatoesSlice them, salt lightly, and let them sit in a colander ten minutes before layering. Ripe tomatoes are mostly water, and the original gives you no thickener beyond the crumbs.
- Bread crumbsDry crumbs from stale bread, not fresh soft ones and not the fine sandy commercial kind. Coarse dry crumbs absorb the juice without turning to paste.
- Butter"A few bits" is about 2 tablespoons for a dish serving four to six. Dot it over the whole surface, not just the middle, or the uncovered crumbs scorch at this temperature.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper between every layer, as written, and a pinch of sugar on very acidic or underripe fruit. The dish has nothing else in it, so under-seasoning is the usual failure.
- Dish and yieldA shallow baking dish of about 1½ quarts, since depth slows the cooking and the recipe assumes it comes to the table in its pan. Figure four to six as a side.
- Canned tomatoesWorkable out of season, but drain them hard and expect a softer result; whole peeled tomatoes broken up beat diced ones, which are treated with calcium chloride to hold their shape.
Farci is French for "stuffed," and strictly a tomate farcie is a hollowed tomato filled with seasoned crumbs or forcemeat and baked. What appears here is the plain layered version — an American scalloped tomato in a French coat — and the borrowed name suggests something about the aspirations of period vegetable cookery, in which a household dish could gain standing from a Continental title. Crumbs, butter and a hot oven applied to a cheap vegetable is a pattern that recurs often in cookbooks of this sort, and layering watery tomatoes with bread was one common way of making them hold together on a plate.