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Stuffed Tomatoes
Wipe, and remove thin slices from stem end of six medium-sized tomatoes. Take out seeds and pulp, sprinkle inside of tomatoes with salt, invert, and let stand one-half hour. Cook five minutes two tablespoons butter with onehalf tablespoon finely chopped onion. Add one-half cup finely chopped cold cooked chicken or veal, one-half cup stale soft bread crumbs, tomato pulp, and salt and pepper to taste. Cook five minutes, then add one egg slightly beaten, cook one minute, and refill tomatoes with mixture. Place in buttered pan, sprinkle with buttered cracker crumbs, and bake twenty minutes in a hot oven.
A straightforward stuffed-vegetable formula from Fannie Farmer's kitchen, built around using up cold roast meat. Two details do most of the work: the salting-and-draining step and a genuinely hot oven.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no numbers; "hot" is usually read today as somewhere around 400-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat sets the filling and browns the crumbs before the tomato walls collapse; at 350F the tomatoes are more likely to weep and slump.
- Do not skip the drainingSalting the hollowed shells and inverting them for half an hour is the hinge of the recipe. Tomatoes are mostly water, and without that half hour the filling turns to soup in the pan.
- Choose firm tomatoesMedium round tomatoes that are ripe but still firm hold their shape. Modern beefsteak or heirloom types are often too soft and thin-walled to stand up; a firm globe tomato of about 6 oz works best.
- Cold cooked chicken or vealThis is a leftovers recipe. Any cold roast or poached meat will do, chopped fine, about 3 oz by weight for the half cup. Cooked ham or a firm mushroom mince substitutes without changing the method.
- Stale soft bread crumbsNot dried breadcrumbs from a can. Tear day-old white bread and pull it into soft crumbs; they absorb the tomato pulp instead of going gritty.
- Buttered cracker crumbsCrushed plain soda crackers tossed with melted butter, roughly 1 tablespoon butter to 1/3 cup crumbs. Panko dressed the same way is a workable stand-in, though coarser.
- The egg stepThe egg is stirred into the hot filling for a minute only, to bind it. The recipe says nothing about lowering the heat, but if the egg scrambles into visible curds the stuffing turns dry and grainy in the oven.
- YieldSix tomatoes serve six as a side dish, or three as a light supper course with bread and a salad.
Stuffed tomatoes belong to the era when the tomato had become an everyday American vegetable, grown in kitchen gardens and sold cheap in summer. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (first published 1896) contains a number of dishes on this plan: a vegetable shell filled with chopped cold meat, bread crumbs and an egg, which is less a recipe than a system for turning Sunday's roast into Tuesday's dinner. The Boston Cooking School taught thrift and precise measurement together, and comparable stuffed-and-baked vegetable dishes appear elsewhere in the book. Buttered cracker crumbs were a common topping of the period, cracker being a pantry staple in a way it no longer quite is.