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Baked Tomatoes II
Wipe six small, selected tomatoes and make two oneinch gashes on blossom end of each, having gashes cross each other at right angles. Place in granite-ware pan and bake until thoroughly heated. Serve with sauce for Devilled Tomatoes, adding, just before serving, one tablespoon heavy cream.
A two-line recipe that assumes you have already read the page for Devilled Tomatoes. The hinge is temperature: the tomatoes are heated through, not collapsed, so they hold their shape on the plate under the sauce.
- Granite-ware panGranite-ware is enamelled steel, speckled grey-blue, common in American kitchens around 1900. Any shallow enamelled, stainless or glass baking dish does the same job; avoid bare cast iron or aluminium, which the acid will pick up as a metallic taste.
- No oven temperature givenThe original leaves the judgement to the cook. A moderate oven, around 375F, will heat a small tomato through; check it rather than trusting a fixed time, as size and ripeness change how fast it goes, and too hot an oven will slump the walls before the centre is hot.
- "Thoroughly heated" is the whole testThese are not roasted or browned. The tomato should be hot at the core and still able to stand upright; press the shoulder and it should yield slightly, not sink.
- Why the gashesThe recipe specifies two one-inch cuts crossing at right angles on the blossom end but does not say why; the likely purposes are to vent steam so the tomato does not burst and to open a shallow well for the sauce. Cut skin and a little flesh only.
- The sauce it depends onA devilled dressing of this period is generally a butter-and-egg mixture sharpened with mustard, vinegar and cayenne, but you will need to read the Devilled Tomatoes page itself to see the proportions. If it contains egg, cook it over hot water rather than direct heat and take it off before it thickens fully; there is no flour here to protect the yolk.
- The tablespoon of creamStirred in off the heat, at the last moment, it softens the vinegar and mustard and loosens a sauce that has tightened. Adding it while the sauce is still on the heat encourages separation.
- Tomato choice'small, selected' implies firm, unblemished fruit of roughly equal size so they finish together. Small round or large plum tomatoes answer; anything soft or overripe will not survive the oven whole.
- YieldSix tomatoes. The recipe does not state servings; one each is the obvious division.
Devilled dishes ran through nineteenth-century Anglo-American cooking: anything sharpened with mustard, cayenne and vinegar earned the name, and the treatment was applied to kidneys, crab, biscuits and, here, tomatoes. By this date the tomato was thoroughly established in American cookery and appeared in the vegetable chapter as a matter of course, baked, scalloped, stuffed or stewed. The construction -- a numbered variation that expects the reader to follow a cross-reference rather than repeat a sauce in full -- is characteristic of the Boston Cooking-School style of book: a plain vegetable, an exact number of gashes, and a rich egg sauce doing the actual work of flavour.