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Devilled Tomatoes
3 Tomatoes Salt and Pepper Flour Butter for Sauteing 4 Tablespoons Butter 2 Teaspoons Powdered Sugar 1 Teaspoon Mustard 1/4 Teaspoon Salt Few Grains Cayenne Yolk 1 Hard Boiled Egg 1 Egg 2 Tablespoons Vinegar Wipe, peel, and cut tomatoes in slices.
Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with rice 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.
A sautéed tomato dish under a cooked mustard-butter dressing — essentially a hollandaise-adjacent sauce sharpened with vinegar and dry mustard. The dressing is the part that can fail.
- The hinge: keep the sauce off direct heatThe dressing is thickened by egg alone, over hot — not boiling — water, with constant stirring. If the bowl touches simmering water or the water is allowed to boil hard, the eggs scramble and the sauce breaks. Pull it as soon as it coats the spoon.
- Flour vs. rice flourThe ingredient list says "Flour" and the method says "rice flour." Either works for dredging; rice flour is generally reckoned to give a crisper, less gummy coat on a wet slice like tomato. Use whichever you have, and dredge just before the pan.
- "Mustard" means dry mustardIn 1900s American cookbooks an unqualified teaspoon of mustard in a dressing is powdered mustard, not prepared. Prepared mustard would add its own vinegar and thin the sauce.
- Powdered sugarPowdered sugar here means finely ground sugar that dissolves into creamed butter without grittiness, not necessarily the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar sold today. Two teaspoons is a seasoning against the vinegar, not a sweetener; granulated sugar is an acceptable substitute.
- Choose firm tomatoesSlice them about half an inch thick and use tomatoes that are ripe but still firm — fully soft ones collapse in the butter and shed water that washes off the flour. Sauté in batches so the pan stays hot.
- Serve immediatelyBoth parts hold badly. The dressing separates as it cools and the tomatoes weep, so have the platter warmed and the sauce ready as the last slices come out of the pan.
- YieldThree tomatoes and this quantity of dressing serve three to four as a side dish.
Devilling, in nineteenth-century English and American usage, meant seasoning something aggressively with mustard, cayenne and vinegar — the heat being, by the traditional explanation, the devil's own. It was applied to kidneys, bones, crab, biscuits and, as here, vegetables, and it was a standard way to make a plain ingredient interesting on a supper or breakfast table. Cooked egg-and-butter dressings of this kind appear to have been familiar in American cooking-school teaching around 1900, where fried tomatoes with a mustard sauce turn up with some regularity, offering dishes that looked accomplished but used ingredients any new household already had. By the time this book was printed the tomato was common enough to be treated as everyday vegetable cookery.