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Vegetable Salads
Sometimes one has a few leeks, a half cauliflower, a handful each of peas and beans. Instead of currying these vegetables (which removes all distinctive flavor from them) cook them gently, and toss them when cold in a good salad dressing. If you can give the yolk of an egg to it, so much the better. Any cold meat is improved by a side dish of this sort. The vegetables that one can curry with advantage are large marrows, cut into cubes, turnips, potatoes, parsnips.
Tomatoes a la Sir Edward Grey Hommage Take some fine firm tomatoes, not very ripe. Turn them with the stalk side up and cut a slice off the top with a sharp knife. Take out the inside with a teaspoon. Break into each tomato a pullet's egg, sprinkle with pepper and salt. The inside of the tomato you will pass through a fine wire sieve and it will be a thick liquor; mix it with bread-crumbs, salt, pepper, and some grated cheese till quite thick. Put this mixture on the top of each egg and place all in the oven for three or four minutes, so that the eggs are only just set and no more.
Two things are going on here: a general method for using up odd handfuls of cooked vegetables, and a specific dish of tomatoes baked with an egg inside. The tomatoes are the part that needs attention, chiefly because the stated oven time is far too short.
- Three or four minutes is wrongA whole egg dropped into a raw tomato and topped with a crumb mixture will not set in three or four minutes at any temperature. At 400F expect 12-18 minutes for whites that are just firm, longer if the tomatoes are large or fridge-cold. Judge by the white, not the clock: it should be opaque with no clear liquid left at the edge.
- No oven temperature is givenUse 400F. Hotter and the tomato skins split and collapse before the egg sets; much cooler and the tomato weeps into the dish while the egg still refuses to firm.
- A pullet's eggAn egg from a young hen, noticeably smaller than a standard one. Use a small or medium egg, and be aware that a modern large egg will overflow a medium tomato — hollow generously or break the egg into a cup first and let some of the white go.
- "Just set and no more" means a soft yolkThat is the intended result and it is still how this dish is served. If you are cooking for anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or cook until the yolk is firm.
- Salt and drain the shellsThe recipe skips this. After hollowing, salt the insides and invert the tomatoes on a rack for 15 minutes, then blot. Otherwise the released juice pools under the egg and the filling slides.
- Sieving the pulpA fine wire sieve gives a thick liquor with the seeds held back. A food mill does the same job in less time; a blender will not, since it pulverises the seeds and thins the pulp. Reduce the pulp in a pan for a few minutes if it is loose before you thicken it with crumbs and cheese.
- The cheeseThe recipe does not name the cheese. Gruyere or another firm grating cheese would suit, and Parmesan works; a young mild cheese will not give enough savour to carry the topping.
- "Currying" in the first paragraphIt means cooking the vegetables in a curry sauce, not the unrelated verb for grooming a horse. The author's point is that a curry mask flattens delicate vegetables like peas and cauliflower, while it suits bland dense ones -- marrow, turnip, potato, parsnip.
- The salad dressing"If you can give the yolk of an egg to it" means enriching the vinaigrette toward a mayonnaise; the conditional phrasing suggests an egg could not always be spared. Dress the vegetables while barely warm rather than fully cold; they absorb far more.
- YieldOne tomato per person as a first course, two as a light lunch dish. The vegetable salad is a side dish, sized to whatever leftovers you have.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and it reads throughout like a book written under shortage — half a cauliflower, a handful of peas, an egg yolk given to the dressing only "if you can." The tribute in the second recipe is to Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916, who in August 1914 held Britain to its guarantee of Belgian neutrality; naming a dish hommage to him was a small piece of gratitude from cooks practising the voluntary economies of wartime England. Tomatoes hollowed and baked with an egg belong to a wider European family of stuffed-vegetable dishes, close kin to the French oeufs en cocotte, and the technique of using the scooped pulp thickened with crumbs and cheese as its own lid is exactly the thrift the rest of the book preaches.