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Stuffed Tomatoes
Take ten good tomatoes and cut off the tops, which are to serve as lids. Remove the insides, and fill with the following mixture: minced veal and ham, rather more veal than ham, mushrooms tossed in butter, a little breadcrumb, milk to render it moist, pepper and salt. Put on the covers and add on each one a scrap of butter. Bake them gently in a fireproof dish. The following excellent sauce is poured over them five minutes before taking them out of the oven: Use any stock that you have, preferably veal, adding the insides of the tomatoes, pepper and salt; pass this through the wire sieve. Make a roux-that is, melt some butter in a pan, adding flour little by little and stirring until it goes a brown color. Add to it then your tomatoes that have been through the sieve, and some more fried mushrooms. Pour this sauce over the whole and serve very hot.
A straightforward baked stuffed tomato with a veal-stock tomato sauce finished at the last minute. The original assumes you have cooked meat, a stockpot and a coal oven, so a few things need pinning down.
- The meat is the hinge"Minced veal and ham" is not specified as raw or cooked, and either reading is possible; in a household book of this kind it may well have been leftover roast or boiled meat, chopped fine. If you use raw veal, the stuffing must reach 71C/160F in the centre, which is likely to take longer than the tomatoes will hold their shape. Cooked meat is the easier option to manage.
- "Bake them gently"No temperature is given; a moderate oven, around 325-350F/165-175C, is a reasonable reading of "gently". Allow roughly 30-35 minutes for large tomatoes with a pre-cooked filling; they should slump slightly but not collapse.
- QuantitiesNo amounts are given for the filling. For ten medium tomatoes, roughly 350g cooked veal and 150g ham, 150g mushrooms, a good handful of fresh breadcrumbs and just enough milk to bind — the mixture should hold together, not run.
- Salt the shellsNot in the original, but worth doing: after hollowing, salt the insides and invert them for fifteen minutes. Modern tomatoes carry more water than they need to, and the sauce is already thin.
- Fireproof dishAny shallow earthenware or enamelled baking dish. Set the tomatoes close together so they prop each other up.
- The rouxBrown roux means cooking the flour in butter until it takes on a nut colour and smell — five to eight minutes over moderate heat, stirring. Stop short of dark brown or it will thicken poorly and taste bitter.
- Sieving the pulpA wire sieve was the standard tool for removing seeds and skin. A food mill or a blitz-and-strain does the same job faster; the point is a smooth purée, not a pulpy one.
- Timing the sauceThe recipe has it poured over five minutes before the end, presumably so it warms through without steaming the tomatoes soft. Have it hot and ready before you open the oven.
- YieldTen tomatoes serves five as a first course or a light lunch, or ten as a side dish alongside plain roast meat.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and the money it raised went to relief work; the collection reads less like a professional cookery manual than like dictation taken down in other people's kitchens, which is why quantities are so often left to the cook's judgement. This dish belongs to a broad Franco-Belgian bourgeois tradition of stuffing vegetables with chopped cooked meat — the same thrift that produces tomates farcies, stuffed courgettes and stuffed cabbage leaves, all of them ways of stretching Sunday's roast across a second meal. The veal-and-ham pairing and the brown roux mark it as solidly of the French culinary orbit that Belgian cooking sat inside, while the instruction to use "any stock that you have" is the authentic voice of a household kitchen rather than a restaurant one.