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Tomatoes on the Half-Shell
Cut the tomatoes in halves without peeling, place them in a baking-pan. Put a piece of butter on top of each and dust with salt and pepper. Stand the pan in the oven and cook the tomatoes slowly about one hour or until perfectly tender. Have ready squares of toasted bread; put a half of a tomato on each square, pour around them Cream Sauce and serve very hot.
A plain baked-tomato dish that depends entirely on slow heat and good fruit. The original assumes a coal range with a slack oven and a cook who can make cream sauce from memory.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe says only "cook slowly" and gives no number; a modern oven at roughly 300-325F is a reasonable equivalent. An hour at that heat brings the tomato to tenderness without scorching the cut face, while a hot oven is likely to blister and weep them well before the hour is up.
- Cut side up, no crowdingThe instruction to put butter "on top of each" implies the halves sit skin-down, so the shell holds the juice. Set them in the pan with space between them, or they steam and slump.
- Choose the fruit accordinglyLarge, firm, slightly underripe round tomatoes hold their shells over an hour. Very ripe or thin-skinned varieties and most modern hothouse fruit will disintegrate; a beefsteak or a firm heirloom is closer to what was meant.
- "A piece of butter"Read this as about a teaspoon per half, no more. It melts into the cut surface and bastes the tomato as the juices rise.
- The cream sauceThe recipe refers to a Cream Sauce given elsewhere in the book; a basic white sauce will serve: equal butter and flour cooked briefly, then milk or cream whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt. Roughly a cup of sauce is enough for four tomatoes.
- The toastCut and toast the bread at the last moment and keep it dry. Soggy toast is the usual failure here; pour the sauce around the base as instructed rather than over the top.
- YieldTwo halves per person as a vegetable course, so four medium tomatoes serve four. Serve on warmed plates, since baked tomato and cream sauce both go cold quickly.
Baked tomatoes are common in American vegetable cookery of the later nineteenth century, by which time the tomato was treated as an ordinary garden vegetable rather than a curiosity. "On the half-shell" appears to be borrowed from oysters, and signals presentation as much as method: the skin left on so each half arrives as its own cup. Serving a vegetable on a square of toast with cream sauce was a familiar device for stretching a small quantity into a course and for giving something soft a base that could be lifted with a fork, as with creamed mushrooms, creamed chipped beef and asparagus on toast.