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Stuffed Tomatoes
6 tomatoes
2 tablespoons butter or savory
1½ cups soft bread-crums fat
¼ teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon salt
The tomatoes should be very firm, smooth, and of equal size. Cut a piece from the stem end of each tomato, and remove the centers without breaking the walls. Make a stuffing of the centers of the tomatoes, crums, seasonings, and melted butter or savory fat, and mix well. Sprinkle each tomato well with salt and pepper and fill with the stuffing, packing it in quite solidly. Place a small piece of butter or fat on the top of each, arrange the tomatoes in a baking-dish and bake in a moderate oven until tender. Serve hot in the baking-dish.
The ingredient list has been set as running text, which makes it look garbled: it is 6 tomatoes, 2 tablespoons butter (or savory fat), 1½ cups soft bread-crumbs, ¼ teaspoon pepper, and 1 teaspoon salt. Nothing else is needed, though the dish rewards a little more seasoning than the original allows.
- "Savory fat"This means rendered drippings — bacon fat, chicken fat, or the fat skimmed from a roast. Butter is the straightforward substitute; bacon fat gives the more interesting result.
- Moderate ovenConventionally around 350-375F. Firm tomatoes of medium size take roughly 25 to 35 minutes; they are done when the walls give to gentle pressure but still hold their shape.
- Soft bread-crumbsNot dry packaged crumbs. Tear the crumb of a day-old loaf into rough pea-sized pieces, or pulse briefly in a processor. Dry crumbs will absorb the tomato pulp into paste and the stuffing will be dense rather than open.
- Drain the pulpThe scooped centers carry a great deal of water. Chop them, let them sit in a sieve for a few minutes, and discard the worst of the juice before mixing with the crumbs, or the filling will slump and the tomatoes will flood the dish.
- Salting the shellsThe instruction to sprinkle each hollowed tomato with salt and pepper is worth following exactly. It seasons the flesh itself, which unseasoned stuffing cannot do from the inside.
- Packing"Quite solidly" is right — loosely filled tomatoes collapse inward as they soften. Mound the tops slightly, since the filling settles.
- Baking-dishChoose one just large enough that the tomatoes support each other. Set them shoulder to shoulder and they will not split. The dish goes to table as it comes from the oven, so use something presentable.
- YieldSix tomatoes serve six as a vegetable course alongside a roast, or three as a light lunch dish.
Stuffed tomatoes belong to a whole family of early twentieth-century American dishes built on the principle that a vegetable hollowed out and refilled with seasoned crumbs counts as a dressed course rather than a plain one — the same logic that produced stuffed peppers, stuffed onions and stuffed cucumbers. The reliance on soft bread-crumbs and "savory fat" is often taken as characteristic of household cookery before commercial shortening and packaged crumbs became widely standard: both were byproducts of a kitchen that bought whole loaves and cooked whole joints of meat, and a thrifty cook may well have had them on hand. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published cookery and household guides for the same audience of home managers who bought its magazines, and the recipes are generally said to lean toward economy, plain seasoning and dishes that could be sent to table in the vessel they were cooked in.