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Baked Tomatoes
6 tomatoes 2 cups soft bread crumbs 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 tablespoon butter Wash tomatoes and cut off stem ends; remove pulp from center and fill with bread crumbs seasoned with salt and pepper; sprinkle with bread crumbs, and place small piece of butter on each. Bake in hot oven 30 minutes. The pulp which has been removed may be seasoned to taste, cooked in the pan and served as a sauce.
A plain stuffed-tomato recipe from the era when bread crumbs were the default filling for anything hollow. A few points make the difference between a firm baked tomato and six collapsed skins.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F. Thirty minutes at that heat suits medium tomatoes; large beefsteaks may need a little longer.
- Soft bread crumbsThis means fresh bread torn or rubbed into crumbs, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Two cups of fresh crumbs is roughly three slices of white bread with the crusts left on. Dry crumbs will absorb the tomato juice and turn to paste.
- Butter is not enough fatOne tablespoon of butter divided across six tomatoes is a small piece on each, in the original's own words. Fresh crumbs will brown better if you toss them with a little melted butter before filling rather than relying on the pat alone.
- Salt the shellsThe recipe seasons only the filling. Salting the hollowed tomatoes lightly and letting them drain upside down for ten minutes draws out water and keeps the bottoms from going soupy.
- Support in the panSet the tomatoes close together in a shallow dish so they hold each other upright. Cut-side-up tomatoes in a large pan tip and empty themselves.
- The pulp sauceThe reserved pulp cooks down in the same pan in about ten minutes to a loose sauce; a pinch of sugar balances underripe fruit. Strain it if you want it smooth, as the seeds and skin flecks stay firm.
- YieldSix tomatoes serve six as a side dish, or three as a light supper course with bread.
Baked or stuffed tomatoes appear widely in American cookbooks from the 1870s onward, and their spread tracks the tomato's own rising fortunes: often said to have been regarded with suspicion in English and American kitchens, it was in any case well established by the second half of the nineteenth century, helped along by canning and by seed catalogues pushing new varieties. The bread-crumb filling here is characteristic of household cookbooks generally in this period, which favored short ingredient lists, pantry staples and dishes that used up stale bread. The closing suggestion to cook the scooped-out pulp into a sauce reflects the same thrift, treating the trimmings as a second dish rather than waste.