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Tomatoes Stuffed with Macaroni
Cut off the stem ends of solid tomatoes and with a spoon carefully remove the seeds. Cut the macaroni in very small pieces, season it with salt, pepper and onion juice, and fill the cavities. Lay a bit of butter on each and bake thirty minutes in a quick oven.
A frugal way to use up leftover boiled macaroni, written for cooks who already had a bowl of it standing in the pantry. The gaps in the original are mostly assumptions the period took for granted.
- The macaroni is already cookedThe recipe assumes leftover boiled macaroni, which is why no cooking time is given for it. Start with about 1 cup of cooked short pasta, drained and cooled, chopped small; raw macaroni will not soften inside a tomato.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F in period terms. Set an oven at that range.
- Thirty minutes is the outer limitThe recipe says thirty minutes, but ripe modern tomatoes may collapse before then at this heat. Check at 15 to 20 minutes and pull them when the skins wrinkle but the walls still stand.
- Onion juiceA standard Victorian seasoning: a cut onion pressed against a grater or squeezed in a cloth, yielding juice without pulp. A quarter teaspoon per tomato is plenty, or substitute a very finely grated shallot.
- Solid tomatoesChoose firm, slightly underripe fruit with thick walls, and salt the hollowed shells and invert them for ten minutes to drain. Otherwise the released liquid waterlogs the filling.
- Seeds only, not the fleshThe instruction is to remove the seeds, not to hollow the tomato out entirely. The inner flesh stays and cooks down around the pasta.
- Butter and bindingA bit of butter on each is the whole enrichment. If you want the filling to hold together on the plate, a spoonful of grated cheese or fine breadcrumbs stirred through the macaroni is in keeping with the period.
- YieldOne tomato per person as a side dish, two as a light supper. They are best served warm rather than hot, when the pulp has settled.
Stuffed tomatoes appear all through late nineteenth and early twentieth century American cookery, once the tomato had shed what is often said to have been a long reputation as suspect and become a cheap summer staple. Recipe collections aimed at low-cost housekeeping favored them precisely because the vegetable was both container and sauce: no dish to grease, no gravy to make, and whatever cold starch was left from yesterday could be seasoned and packed inside. Onion juice, used here in place of chopped onion, was the standard genteel solution of the era for getting allium flavor without visible pieces, and it turns up constantly in books of this period, from croquette fillings to salad dressings. Macaroni itself had been an English-inherited baked-and-buttered dish for most of the nineteenth century.