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Stuffed Tomato
Cut a thin slice from smooth end of tomatoes. Scoop out pulp, mix with an equal quantity of cold cooked rice, macaroni, or bread crumbs. Add salt, pepper, butter and a few drops of onion juice. Refill tomato shells, cover with tops, and bake one half hour.
A brief formula that assumes the cook already knows the standard baked-tomato method. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, which the original never gives, and the wetness of the filling.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. A moderate oven, in the region of 350-375F, suits the half hour the recipe allows; large beefsteak tomatoes may need nearer 40 minutes.
- Drain the pulpThis is the hinge. Tomato pulp is mostly water, and stirring it straight into rice or crumbs gives a soupy filling that leaks and collapses the shell. Chop the pulp, let it drain in a sieve for a few minutes, or cook it down briefly before combining.
- Onion juiceA period ingredient made by grating a halved onion and using the liquid, or pressing grated onion in a cloth. A quarter teaspoon of very finely grated onion or a small pinch of onion powder gives the same background flavor without adding moisture.
- Salt the shellsScoop the tomatoes, salt the insides lightly, and stand them upside down for ten minutes before filling. This draws out water that would otherwise pool in the baking dish.
- Butter quantityUnspecified, as usual. About a tablespoon for four tomatoes is enough to bind the crumbs or rice; more if you are using bread crumbs, which absorb it readily.
- The lidsReplacing the cut tops keeps the filling from drying, but they will not brown. If you want color, bake uncovered for the last ten minutes with a little buttered crumb on top and set the lids aside.
- Baking dishUse a dish that holds the tomatoes snugly upright, or set each in a muffin cup. Loose in a large pan they slump sideways as the flesh softens.
- YieldFigure one to two tomatoes per person as a side dish; the recipe scales to whatever you have, since the filling is measured against the pulp itself.
Stuffed tomatoes were a fixture of American cookbooks through the nineteenth century, by which time the tomato was a summer staple in kitchen gardens. The recipe belongs to a whole family of instructions built on the same logic as stuffed peppers and stuffed onions: hollow the vegetable, extend its own pulp with a cheap starch, season, and return it to the shell. Lowney's Cook Book (published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, better known for its confectionery and cocoa chapters) carries a full complement of such plain vegetable cookery alongside the candy, which is often said to have been characteristic of manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks of the era: the branded recipes sold the product, and the general chapters made the book worth keeping on the shelf. The cold cooked rice or macaroni here may also reflect a household habit of the period, in which leftovers from one meal were designed into the next rather than discarded.