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Plaza Tomatoes
3 tomatoes 1 tablespoon grated cheese 1 teaspoon sugar 2 tablespoons bread crumbs 1 tablespoon cream 1 teaspoon minced onion Paprika and salt Cut three tomatoes of uniform size in half and take out the pulp. Sprinkle the shell with salt and put the pulp in a saucepan with the cheese, onion, cream, paprika, salt, bread and a teaspoon of sugar. Cook a few minutes, then put the mixture in the halves with butter on top. Put into the oven, and cook until browned.
Serve each half on a piece of buttered toast.
A straightforward stuffed tomato from the era when a hot vegetable dish on toast counted as a main course. The recipe assumes you know how to handle a tomato shell, and gives no oven temperature at all.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. A moderately hot oven, around 400F, should brown the crumb topping in roughly 15-20 minutes without collapsing the shells.
- Drain the shellsThe recipe salts the insides but says nothing about draining them. Salting and standing them cut-side down on a rack or towel for about 15 minutes will draw off water that would otherwise soak the toast.
- Cooking the filling"Cook a few minutes" means reducing the tomato pulp until it is thick enough to mound in a spoon, roughly 5-8 minutes over medium heat. A loose filling will run out during baking.
- CreamCream of this period was not standardised, and the fat content is unknowable from the recipe. Something in the range of modern light cream or half-and-half suits the quantity; heavy cream also works, and skim milk will not carry the cheese.
- Grated cheeseUnspecified, as often in recipes of this kind. 'Grated cheese' in American books of the period usually points to something dry enough to grate, such as Parmesan or a firm aged Cheddar, rather than a melting cheese. One tablespoon is a modest amount; doubling it is no loss.
- Butter on topThe quantity is left out. Dot each half with about a quarter teaspoon; it is there to brown the crumbs, not to enrich the filling.
- YieldSix halves, serving three as a light lunch course or six as a side. Have the toast ready and buttered at the moment the tomatoes come out, since it goes soft quickly underneath them.
Meatless cookery of the 1910s and 1920s leaned hard on the tomato, which was cheap, arrived in quantity every August, and had enough savory depth -- glutamates, though nobody phrased it that way -- to stand in for a meat course. Stuffed tomatoes appear in dozens of vegetarian and wartime-economy books of the period, usually filled with rice, crumbs, cheese or a combination. The "Plaza" in the title is the sort of hotel-borrowed name that publishers and home cooks attached freely to dishes at the time; New York's Plaza Hotel opened in 1907, though the attribution here is decorative rather than documented. The teaspoon of sugar is worth noticing: it turns up often enough in American tomato cookery of the era, and is commonly explained as a way to round out fruit that had been picked firm and shipped.