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Tomatoes Stuffed with Chicken Livers
6 tomatoes. 6 chicken livers. 1/2 tablespoon butter. 1 tablespoon olive oil. 1/2 teaspoon minced parsley. 1 pinch nutmeg. 1 cup fresh bread crumbs. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper. 1/4 grated onion. Cut off the top of tomatoes, remove the inside with a spoon and chop up bread and livers (after being boiled). Then add salt, pepper, onion, parsley, butter and nutmeg. Fry in oil, put back in tomato shells, dust with bread crumbs and bake ten minutes.
A compact wartime-era stuffed vegetable that assumes the cook knows a few things the text leaves out: an oven temperature, what to do with the scooped-out tomato pulp, and how long chicken livers want in the pot.
- Oven temperatureMrs. Wilson gives none. Bake at 400F; the filling is already cooked, so the ten minutes is only to heat through and set the crumb topping. Larger tomatoes may want fifteen.
- Salt and drain the shellsThe single step that decides whether this is a stuffed tomato or a puddle. Salt the hollowed shells lightly, invert them on a rack for fifteen minutes, then fill. Tomatoes shed a surprising amount of liquid in a hot oven.
- Boiling the livers"After being boiled" means simmered until firm and no longer pink at the center, roughly five to eight minutes in salted water. Chicken liver should be cooked through, not left rosy; a hard boil, though, turns it grainy.
- "1/4 grated onion"A quarter of an onion, grated on the coarse side of a box grater — a tablespoon or two of pulp and juice. Read as a fraction of an onion, not a quarter cup.
- CayenneA quarter teaspoon across six tomatoes is assertive by modern palates and reflects a period fondness for cayenne in savory forcemeats. Start with an eighth if you are unsure; the nutmeg is doing quieter work alongside it.
- The bread crumbs do double dutyThe recipe lists one cup of crumbs and also calls for a dusting on top, so either hold back part of the cup or grate a little extra. Toss the topping crumbs with a bit of oil or butter or they stay pale.
- Frying the mixtureThe butter goes into the mixture with the seasonings; the tablespoon of oil is the frying fat. A brief pan-fry binds the filling and drives off moisture, two or three minutes over medium heat. Do not brown it hard; it bakes again.
- The scooped pulpThe recipe never tells you what to do with the tomato insides. Chop and add a spoonful or two back to the filling for moisture, or save the rest for a sauce.
- YieldSix tomatoes, one per person as a vegetable course or a light luncheon dish with bread.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia readers in the years around the First World War, when household columns pressed cooks to stretch meat and waste nothing — and chicken livers, one to a bird, were exactly the kind of odd scrap a thrifty kitchen accumulated and needed a use for. Stuffed tomatoes had been fashionable in American cookbooks since the late nineteenth century, the hollowed shell serving as an edible ramekin. The nutmeg with liver is an older European habit, carried through French and English forcemeat traditions, where a warm spice was standard against the mineral taste of offal.