Home › Seven Weeks' Menus › Devilled Tomatoes
Devilled Tomatoes
4 firm tomatoes salt and pepper 1/3 cup shortening 2 teaspoons sugar 1 teaspoon mustard 1/4 cup vinegar 1 beaten egg 1 hard cooked egg yolk 4 tablespoons fat Peel, slice, season and cook the tomatoes in the shortening till tender. Use frying pan. Cream the 4 tablespoons fat with sugar and mustard, add the raw egg and the hard cooked egg yolk, and the vinegar. Cook in double boiler till thick, pour over the tomatoes, serve very hot. Serves 6.
A skillet of fried tomatoes finished with a cooked mustard dressing — essentially a boiled salad dressing served hot. The dressing is the whole dish, and it is the part that can go wrong.
- Keep the dressing below a simmerThe double boiler exists so the egg thickens without scrambling. Take it off the heat at about 165-170F, when it coats a spoon; direct heat or a rolling boil underneath will curdle it into sweet mustard scrambled egg.
- Mustard means dry mustardMustard probably means dry mustard -- "1 teaspoon mustard" creamed into a fat, sugar and mustard base most likely means powdered mustard rather than a prepared jarred condiment. If you substitute prepared mustard the dressing will be thinner and milder.
- Two fats, two jobsThe 1/3 cup shortening is frying fat; vegetable shortening or oil is fine, and you may not need all of it. The recipe says only "fat" for the 4 tablespoons creamed with sugar and mustard, but since it is treated like a creamed butter base, butter is the sensible choice and carries the flavour.
- Vinegar strength1/4 cup is a lot of acid for four tomatoes, and the recipe does not say which vinegar. Cider vinegar suits the dish; distilled white vinegar at the same volume will taste harsher. Add it gradually to the egg mixture and stop when the balance suits you.
- Slice thicknessCut the peeled tomatoes about half an inch thick. Thinner slices collapse into sauce in the pan before they colour, which defeats the point of frying them first.
- PeelingScore the base, thirty seconds in boiling water, then cold water; the skins slip off. Unpeeled slices hold together better but the skins curl away from the flesh in the pan.
- YieldFour tomatoes stretched to six servings means this is a side dish, not a main. As a lunch or supper dish for four it wants toast underneath to catch the dressing.
- Serve immediatelyThe dressing stiffens and can separate as it cools. Warm the plates, sauce at the last moment, and do not try to hold it.
To "devil" a dish, in English and American cookery, meant to season it sharply -- mustard, vinegar, cayenne, sometimes Worcestershire. The term is attested in cookery from the later eighteenth century, and the name is usually explained as a reference to infernal heat, though that account is traditional rather than documented. Devilled kidneys, devilled ham and devilled eggs all follow the same logic, and devilled tomatoes puts the treatment on a vegetable that American kitchens had in quantity through late summer. The sauce here belongs to the family of cooked or "boiled" dressings, made with egg, vinegar, sugar and a little fat, which were common in home cookery before commercial mayonnaise became cheap and ubiquitous.