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Tomatoes Stuffed with Beans
Halve and empty the tomatoes, and put a few drops of vinegar in each. Cook your beans, whether French beans or haricots or flageolets, and stir them, when tender, into a good thick bechamel sauce. Let this get cold. Empty out the vinegar from the tomatoes and fill them with the mixture, pouring over the top some mayonnaise sauce and parsley.
A cold composed salad rather than a baked stuffed tomato: everything is cooked separately, cooled, and assembled. The hinge is the béchamel, which must be thick enough to hold its shape once chilled.
- Make the béchamel stiffA pouring sauce will slump out of the tomato shells. Work to roughly 2 tablespoons each butter and flour per cup of milk, cook out the flour, and season firmly — cold food tastes flatter than warm.
- The vinegar stepThe few drops of vinegar sit in the hollowed halves and season the flesh from inside while the filling cools; the recipe does not say for how long. Tip it out before filling, and let the shells drain, or the mixture will loosen.
- Which beansFrench beans are green beans, cut into short lengths. Haricots are dried white beans, soaked and simmered until tender. Flageolets are the pale green immature haricot, still sold dried and in jars. Any of the three works; drain them very well before they meet the sauce.
- Cool it properly"Let this get cold" means thoroughly cold and set, not merely off the heat. A warm filling will weep into the tomato and thin the mayonnaise on top.
- MayonnaiseThe original assumes a hand-made mayonnaise with raw yolk. Use pasteurised eggs or a good jarred mayonnaise if serving to anyone vulnerable, and loosen it with a spoonful of water so it pours rather than sits in a lump.
- Tomatoes to chooseMedium, firm, slightly underripe fruit holds its walls. Salt the emptied halves lightly along with the vinegar to draw out excess water.
- Yield and servingAround 4 medium tomatoes, 8 halves, serves four as a first course or light lunch. Serve on the day it is assembled, cold but not straight from the fridge.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion, and its proceeds went to relief work; the dishes are domestic rather than restaurant cooking, which is why so many of them are frugal assemblies of a sauce, a vegetable and whatever else was to hand. Beans in béchamel is a thoroughly Flemish and northern French habit — the same instinct that produces creamed leeks and creamed chicory — and turning the cooled mixture out into raw tomato shells with mayonnaise over the top belongs to the wider European fashion for cold composed hors d'œuvre. The flageolet named here was a comparatively recent bean in kitchen use, usually associated with French growers of the later nineteenth century who selected haricots that could be picked and kept green rather than left to dry.