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Celery with Tomato Sauce
Cut off the green leaves, clean and wash the celery stalks, and then throw them into boiling water and boil fast for twenty minutes. Drain, dry well, put them on a dish, and pour a pint of tomato sauce, or tomato paste diluted with hot water, over them.
Tomatoes "alla Piemontese" Take four rather unripe tomatoes of about the same size, put them into boiling water and boil for a few minutes. Cut off the stem part, and take out some of the inside with as many seeds as you can. Fill them with boiled rice and some mushrooms chopped up small. Pour over them the yolks of two eggs, place them in the oven to color; serve hot.
Tomatoes "alla Spagnuola" Take three or four large ripe tomatoes and boil them. Lay them on a sieve to drain until wanted, and then pass them through a fine hair-sieve. Put them in a stew-pan and stir until all the liquid is evaporated. Then add a small piece of butter and three or four raw eggs, stirring them quickly with the tomatoes. When the eggs are cooked, turn all out into a dish and serve hot.
Three short vegetable dishes run together on one page: boiled celery under tomato sauce, rice-stuffed tomatoes glazed with yolk, and a tomato scramble. None is difficult, but the timings and the vessels need translating.
- Twenty minutes is too long for celeryTwenty minutes is a long boil for celery as sold now, which tends to be more tender than the thick winter stalks the book seems to assume. Eight to ten minutes at a rapid boil, until a knife tip meets slight resistance, will usually be enough; the full twenty risks strings in grey water.
- Dry it well, and mean itThis is the hinge of the first dish. Wet celery thins the sauce into a puddle on the plate; blot the drained stalks on a towel before saucing.
- A pint of sauceTwo cups by American measure (an imperial pint would be a fifth more), which is generous for one head of celery. Tomato paste let down with hot water was a common pantry shortcut: roughly one part paste to three or four parts water, seasoned with salt and a little oil.
- "Place them in the oven to color"No temperature is given; a hot oven, around 400F for 10-15 minutes, or a few minutes under the broiler once the filling is hot, will do it. The yolks are a glaze, not a custard; they should set and brown lightly, not sit raw.
- Underripe tomatoes are deliberateFirm, barely-ripe fruit holds its shape when hollowed and baked. The brief boil loosens the skin and softens the shell; do not boil until slumping or the filled tomato will collapse.
- A fine hair-sieveA horsehair sieve. One reason usually given for hair rather than metal is that metal could discolour acidic fruit. A fine-mesh strainer or a food mill does the same job, and stainless steel is no longer a concern.
- The Spagnuola eggsOnce the pulp is reduced to a thick paste, the pan should be off high heat before the eggs go in. Stir constantly over low heat and pull it while still slightly loose, as with any scrambled egg. Three or four eggs to three or four tomatoes serves two.
- YieldEach dish makes roughly two to three servings as a vegetable course; they read as side dishes rather than mains.
Simple Italian Cookery belongs to a small wave of early twentieth-century English-language books written to persuade British and American cooks that Italian food was cheap, vegetable-heavy and worth imitating. The regional tags here are the giveaway of the genre: alla Piemontese and alla Spagnuola are the sort of loose kitchen labels whose meanings shifted from cook to cook. Cooked celery, now unfashionable in English-speaking kitchens outside soup, was a standard winter vegetable in both countries, and boiling then saucing it was one common treatment. The tomato paste mentioned in the first recipe marks the period neatly: conserva was already a commercial product in Italy, sold as a thick dark concentrate, and diluting it with hot water was an everyday shortcut to sauce.