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Flour (Butter for saut ing)
3 tomatoes Butter for sautéing 4 tablespoons butter 2 teaspoons powdered sugar 1 teaspoon mustard ¼ teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Yolk 1 "hard-boiled" egg 1 egg 2 tablepoons vinegar Wipe, peel, and cut tomatoes in slices. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and sauté in butter. Place on a hot platter and pour over the dressing made by creaming the butter, adding dry ingredients, yolk of egg rubbed to a paste, egg beaten slightly, and vinegar, then cooking over hot water, stirring constantly until it thickens. Baked Tomatoes I Wipe, and remove a thin slice from stem end of six smooth, medium-sized tomatoes. Take out seeds and pulp, and drain off most of the liquid. Add an equal quantity of bread crumbs, season with salt, pepper, and a few drops onion juice, and refill tomatoes with mixture. Place in a buttered pan, sprinkle with buttered crumbs, and bake twenty minutes in a hot oven. Two tablespoons, each, chopped green pepper and onion are an improvement.
Two tomato dishes run together here, and the page opens mid-ingredient-list: the flour and the tomatoes themselves belong to the sauté, and only the butter through vinegar make up the dressing. Read it as sliced tomatoes floured and pan-fried, sauced with a cooked ("boiled") dressing, followed by a separate recipe for stuffed baked tomatoes.
- The hinge: the dressing must not breakCook it in a bowl set over barely simmering water, never over direct heat, and stir without stopping. It thickens at custard temperature; a rolling boil underneath will scramble the egg and the butter will separate out.
- "Mustard" means dry mustardA teaspoon of powder, English or Colman's-style, not prepared condiment mustard. It goes in with the sugar and salt so it hydrates evenly in the butter.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term often covered finely granulated sugar as well as the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Either dissolves here; two teaspoons is a seasoning, not a sweetener.
- The two eggs do different jobsThe hard-boiled yolk, pressed through a sieve or mashed to a smooth paste, gives body and stops the dressing tasting raw. The whole raw egg is the thickener. Beat it only slightly, as directed, or you will fold in air that turns to foam.
- Vinegar lastTwo tablespoons, added after the beaten egg. Note that in this recipe the vinegar goes in before the mixture is set over the hot water, not at the end of cooking.
- Slicing and dredgingCut the tomatoes about half an inch thick, salt them, and let them stand a few minutes before flouring; the flour then sticks instead of sliding off in the pan. Sauté in a wide pan over fairly high heat so they colour before collapsing.
- "A hot oven"For the baked tomatoes, read 400-425F. Twenty minutes is right for medium tomatoes; any longer and the shells slump.
- Buttered crumbs and onion juiceButtered crumbs are breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, the proportion left to taste. Onion juice is what you get from grating an onion on the fine side of a box grater and using the liquid; a little grated onion does the same work.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of tomatoes for the sauté, so the dressing's yield is a matter of judgement. The baked tomatoes serve six, one each, as a side dish.
The dressing here is a cooked or "boiled" dressing, the older American cousin of mayonnaise: butter and egg thickened over water, sharpened with vinegar and mustard, and stabilised by a hard-boiled yolk. Its appearance over fried tomatoes is very much of its moment. Tomatoes had shed their old reputation as suspect nightshades by the second half of the nineteenth century and become a summer staple, and Fannie Farmer's book, first published in 1896 as the manual of the Boston Cooking School, devoted a long run of the vegetable chapter to them: scalloped, stuffed, broiled, baked, and sautéed. The pairing of a hot floured slice with a sweet-sour cooked dressing is the same instinct that survives in fried green tomatoes with a tangy sauce.