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Baked Tomatoes
Cut some ripe tomatoes in halves, put them in a buttered baking-dish, sprinkle with plenty of sifted breadcrumbs, pepper and salt to taste, stick small bits of butter over the top and bake them until the tops are slightly browned. Tomatoes, Bock Style Wipe and peel eight fine, fresh, ripe tomatoes. Cut each one into six equal-sized pieces, and place them in a saucepan with two ounces of butter, season with one pinch of salt and one-half pinch of pepper, and one-third of a pinch of grated nutmeg. Cover the pan and place it on a hot stove to cook the contents for fifteen minutes or so. Remove from the fire, pour the tomatoes into a deep, hot vegetable dish, and send them to the table very hot.
Two tomato dishes run together on one page: a plain baked half-tomato with crumbs, and a quick stewed version in butter. Neither gives an oven temperature or a yield, and both assume tomatoes with more flavour than a winter supermarket fruit.
- Oven heatOscar gives none. Bake the crumbed halves at 375-400F; the crumbs need heat enough to colour in 20-30 minutes without the tomatoes collapsing into water. A lower oven just stews them.
- Cut side up, and drainThe hinge on the baked version is moisture. Halve the tomatoes across the equator, salt the cut faces and let them sit ten minutes, then pour off the liquid before crumbing, or the crumbs turn to paste.
- Sifted breadcrumbsThis means dry crumbs from stale bread pushed through a sieve, not the soft fresh crumb and not commercial panko. Dry fine crumbs bound with the butter are what brown evenly here.
- Pinch measuresThe book nowhere defines a pinch; by common convention it is reckoned at roughly an eighth of a teaspoon, so "one-third of a pinch" of nutmeg is a scrape or two off a whole nut. Grate it fresh, since pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its point within months.
- Two ounces of butterFour tablespoons, half a stick, for eight tomatoes. It melts into the juice the tomatoes throw, giving a loose buttery liquid rather than a slick on top.
- Fifteen minutes coveredOn a modern burner this is a fast, hard simmer. Covered, the tomatoes throw a great deal of liquid; if you want the dish spoonable rather than soupy, finish the last few minutes uncovered.
- PeelingScore an X in the base, thirty seconds in boiling water, then into cold, and the skins slip. Skins left on the Bock Style version will roll up into tough curls in the sauce.
- YieldEight tomatoes stewed serves four to six as a vegetable. Figure one whole tomato, two halves, per person for the baked dish.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s, and his 1896 book is less a work of authorship than a working file of the hotel kitchen's repertoire, printed with the terseness of notes written for cooks who already knew the drill. Baked tomatoes with buttered crumbs was standard American hotel vegetable service of the period, cheap, quick and presentable. The second entry, "Bock Style," is one of the many dishes in the book named for a patron, a supplier or a house tradition, its origin unrecorded; the Waldorf kitchen turned out dozens of such tags, and most are undocumented. The nutmeg is the older touch. Grating nutmeg over cooked vegetables was routine in nineteenth-century European kitchens, and Oscar, Swiss-born, kept it long after plainer American cooking had let it go.