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Baked Tomatoes, No.2
6 tomatoes, as near on size as possible. 1 heaping tablespoon bread crumbs. 1 tablespoon grated cheese. 6 mushrooms. 1 tablespoon chopped parsley. 1 tablespoon butter. Pepper and salt.
Cut the tomatoes in halves if large enough. Scrape out some of pulp and add to the mixture. When mixed fill tomatoes, place in buttered tin, season highly and bake in moderate oven 20 minutes.
A short stuffed-tomato recipe that assumes the cook can fill in the blanks. Two things need settling before you start: the oven number and what happens to the mushrooms.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" in Mrs. Wilson's period is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Twenty minutes at that heat softens the tomato shells without collapsing them.
- Cook the mushrooms firstThe recipe says only to mix them in, but raw mushrooms shed a great deal of water in twenty minutes and will flood the shells. Chop and saute them in the butter until the pan is dry, then combine with the crumbs, cheese, parsley and reserved pulp.
- Drain the pulpScraped tomato pulp is mostly juice and seeds. Press it in a sieve and use the solids; the filling should be moist, not slack.
- "Season highly"The instruction comes after the tomatoes are filled and in the tin, though it is reasonable to season the filling too — roughly half a teaspoon of salt across six tomatoes plus good pepper. Tomatoes cooked without enough salt taste thin.
- The cheeseThe recipe says only "grated cheese." A firm domestic Cheddar or a dry Parmesan-style grating cheese both suit it; a hard aged cheese browns better on top.
- Buttered tinA shallow metal baking pan, buttered so the halves do not stick. Set them cut side up and close together so they hold each other upright.
- YieldSix tomatoes, halved if they are large enough, gives up to twelve pieces — a side dish for perhaps four to six. One heaping tablespoon of crumbs is a modest amount of filling; scale up if your tomatoes are large.
Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote her New Cook Book at a moment when the tomato was thoroughly established in American kitchens, turning up in numerous forms in a single vegetable chapter — hence a recipe numbered "No. 2," indicating simply that another baked-tomato recipe precedes it. Stuffed and baked tomatoes belong to a family of dishes that treat a vegetable as its own serving vessel, convenient for a period cook working without individual ramekins. Wilson herself was a domestic-science writer who came up through the wartime food-conservation years, and the recipe shows it: a tablespoon each of crumbs, cheese, butter and parsley stretches six tomatoes and six mushrooms into a course, with nothing wasted, not even the scraped-out pulp.