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Tomatoes Stuffed with Mushrooms
Remove centers from whole tomatoes. Mix pulp with chopped broiled or fried mushrooms and finely chopped onions and parsley. Moisten with mayonnaise, and stuff back into the tomato shells.
A cold stuffed-tomato salad rather than a baked dish, given here as the salad course of a Thanksgiving menu. No quantities are stated, so work by eye and taste.
- ProportionsFor four medium tomatoes, figure on about 8 oz mushrooms, 2 tablespoons finely chopped onion, a tablespoon of parsley and 3 to 4 tablespoons mayonnaise. The filling should hold together but not turn soupy.
- Drain the shellsAfter scooping out the centers, salt the insides lightly and invert them on a rack for 15 to 20 minutes. Tomatoes shed a surprising amount of liquid, and skipping this step thins the mayonnaise and floods the plate.
- Deal with the pulpThe recipe has you mix the scooped centers back in, but they are largely seeds and juice. Chopping the flesh and leaving out the watery seed jelly keeps the dressing from separating.
- "Broiled or fried" mushroomsCook them hard in a wide pan until the released moisture has evaporated and the edges brown. Underbrowned mushrooms weep into the filling as it stands.
- Raw onionChop it very fine and, if the onion is strong, rinse it in cold water and pat dry. Nothing in this dish is cooked after mixing, so the onion stays at full strength.
- MayonnaiseMayonnaise of this period might be homemade with raw yolk, though jarred commercial mayonnaise was also widely available. Use commercial mayonnaise, or a homemade one with pasteurized egg, since the salad is served without further cooking.
- ServingAssemble no more than an hour ahead and keep refrigerated on a bed of lettuce or watercress. Held longer, the shells slump and the filling loosens. One tomato per person as a salad course.
Stuffed raw tomatoes were a fixture of American salad courses from the late nineteenth century through the mid twentieth, when the salad was often expected to arrive as a composed, individually portioned object rather than a tossed bowl. Cookbooks of the late 1920s and 1930s made frequent use of the style, and a filled tomato shell had the practical advantage of being assembled before guests sat down. Mayonnaise, by then sold in jars nationwide, was a common binder for chopped fillings of this kind.