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Tomato and Forcemeat Pie
1 pound of tomatoes Forcemeat Short paste Put the tomatoes into boiling water for a few seconds, when the peel will come off easily. Slice them after they are peeled, and place them at the bottom of a shallow pie dish. Place a layer of forcemeat over them about an inch thick. Cover the dish with a short crust, and bake until the crust is done. Make the forcemeat according to the forcemeat recipe, and the crust from recipe for short paste.
A two-page recipe in the old style: it assumes you already have the book's forcemeat and short paste to hand. The whole dish turns on managing the water in the tomatoes.
- Forcemeat, meatless versionIn a vegetarian book the forcemeat is a bound stuffing of breadcrumbs, chopped herbs, seasoning and usually egg or butter, not sausage meat. Any savoury herb-and-crumb stuffing mixture works; it should be firm enough to spread in a slab, not loose and wet.
- Short pasteShortcrust: roughly half fat to flour by weight, bound with cold water. Roll it thin, no thicker than about 1/8 inch.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature, only 'bake until the crust is done'. A brisk oven of roughly 400-425F suits a single short crust, and a shallow dish will likely need something like 30-40 minutes; go by the crust, which should be firm and coloured, not just set.
- Drain the tomatoesA pound of peeled sliced tomatoes will throw a great deal of liquid, and the forcemeat layer sits directly on top of it. Salt the slices and let them drain 20 minutes, or the stuffing turns to porridge and the pastry rim goes soggy.
- PeelingA few seconds in boiling water is optimistic for underripe fruit. Score a cross in the base, give them 15-30 seconds, then into cold water; the skins slip off cleanly.
- Vent the crustThe original does not say so, but cut two or three steam vents. Sealed over a wet filling, the pastry lifts away from the forcemeat and leaves a hollow dome.
- Dish and yieldNo size is given; a shallow pie dish of around 8 inches suits a pound of tomatoes. As written it will serve perhaps three or four as a light main course, more as a side; the proportions scale straightforwardly.
"Forcemeat" derives, by way of an alteration of the word, from the French farce, a stuffing, and by the nineteenth century the term was often applied to bound, seasoned mixtures pressed into a shape or a cavity, meatless versions included. Vegetarian cookery books of the late Victorian and Edwardian period made frequent use of it: a crumb-and-herb forcemeat gave the bulk, the savour and the sliceable texture that a joint would otherwise have supplied. The cross-referencing here, sending the cook off to a separate forcemeat recipe and a separate short paste, is characteristic of the era's household manuals, which assumed a small repertoire of base preparations learned once and applied everywhere. Tomatoes baked under a crust were a natural fit for a movement that wanted dishes to look like the roast-and-pie dinners its readers were giving up.