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Stuffed Tomatoes
Tomatoes for baking or frying can scarcely be too firm, and should be smooth and of equal size. Cut a piece from the stem end of each tomato, and remove the seeds without breaking the walls or partitions. Make a stuffing, allowing as follows for six medium-sized tomatoes: One and one-half cups of bread crumbs; one and one-half teaspoons of salt; one-fourth of pepper; two tablespoons of melted butter. The bread should be soft and should be crumbled by rubbing it on a tin grater. Having mixed the stuffing well, place a dusting of salt and pepper in each tomato, fill the cavity with the stuffing, and place a small piece of butter on top. The stuffing should be packed in quite solidly. Arrange the tomatoes in a porcelain baking-dish, bake for forty minutes in a moderate heat, and serve hot in the baking-dish.
A plain baked stuffed tomato from the Butterick book's vegetable chapter, relying entirely on good bread and good tomatoes. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- Oven temperature"A moderate heat" is usually taken to mean somewhere around 350-375F. Forty minutes at that temperature suits large, very firm tomatoes; smaller ones may collapse well before then, so start checking at 25 minutes.
- Bread crumbs, not dry crumbsThe instruction to rub soft bread on a tin grater produces coarse, fluffy fresh crumbs, not the fine sandy dry crumbs sold in canisters. Grate or tear a day-old white loaf; packaged crumbs will pack into a dense paste and absorb all the tomato juice.
- "One-fourth of pepper"Read as one-fourth teaspoon, carrying over from the preceding measure. A teaspoon and a half of salt for six tomatoes is generous by modern taste, particularly with the additional dusting inside each shell; three-quarters of a teaspoon in the stuffing is closer to current practice.
- The porcelain baking-dishThe recipe calls for porcelain rather than bare metal; acidity is the likely reason, since tomatoes react with unlined tin or cast iron, though the book does not say so. Any glass, ceramic or enameled dish works; avoid unlined aluminum, which will pick up a metallic edge.
- Packing solidlyThe stuffing is packed tight so it holds shape as the tomato walls slump. Fill the cavities level or slightly domed and set the tomatoes close together in the dish so they support one another.
- DrainingThe recipe does not say to salt and invert the hollowed shells, but doing so for ten minutes draws off water and keeps the crumbs from turning to soup. The seeds and pulp scooped out are worth keeping for stock or sauce.
- YieldSix tomatoes serve six as a side dish, or three as a light supper course with bread and cheese.
Stuffed tomatoes became a fixture in American cookbooks over the course of the nineteenth century, as the tomato itself gained ground; the often-repeated story of earlier suspicion of the fruit as a poisonous nightshade is more folklore than documented fact, and by the time the Butterick Publishing Company issued its cook book in 1911 tomatoes were a summer commonplace in kitchen gardens and markets alike. The recipe belongs to a broad family of crumb-stuffed vegetables that let a cook stretch stale bread into a hot dish, and its insistence that the fruit be firm, smooth and of equal size is in keeping with a period concern with dishes that came to the table looking uniform. Butterick was a dress-pattern company, and its cook book was aimed at the same middle-class household reader as its pattern catalogues; the recipe has the dish served in the vessel it was baked in rather than dirtying a platter.