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Fried Tomatoes
Cut six or eight large tomatoes into thick slices, dip them in egg well beaten, with a seasoning of salt, pepper and sugar, and cover them with bread or cracker-crumbs. Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter in a fryingpan, cover the bottom of the pan with slices of tomatoes and fry them for about ten minutes, turning them so as to cook both sides equally. Place them on pieces of toast, spread on a dish, and serve.
Tomatoes, Marseilles Style Select six good-sized firm tomatoes, wipe and cut them into halves through the sides. Pour one-half gill of sweet oil into a fryingpan, let it heat well, lay in the tomatoes on the sides which were cut, and cook briskly for one minute. Butter well a tin baking-dish, lay the tomatoes in this on the uncooked sides, and season with one-half pinch each of pepper and salt. Make a stuffing with finely-chopped shallot, two cloves of crushed garlic, one teaspoonful of chopped chives, two hard-boiled eggs, one teaspoonful of parsley, two finely-chopped anchovies, and one ounce of butter. Stir well together in a bowl and cover the tops of the tomatoes with the stuffing, dividing it equally. Dust with a little fresh breadcrumbs, drop three or four drops of warmed butter over each tomato, and bake in a very hot oven for eight minutes. Tomatoes on Toast Cut the tomatoes in halves, sprinkle them over with salt and pepper, place them on a baking-dish, the cut side upwards, and bake in a hot oven. Cut as many rounds of bread as there are halves of tomatoes, toast them a nice golden-brown on both sides, and butter them while hot. When the tomatoes are cooked place a half on each round of toast. Spread a folded napkin on a hot dish, garnish it with fried parsley, and serve.
Three tomato preparations run together on one page, all built for a hotel line cook with a hot range and a hotter oven. A few of Oscar's measures and oven cues need translating.
- Slice thickness is the hingeFor the fried tomatoes, cut slices a good half-inch thick and use tomatoes that are firm to slightly underripe. Thin or dead-ripe slices collapse in the pan and the crumb coating slides off in the turning.
- Two tablespoons of butter is not enoughButter alone will brown and burn before ten minutes are up, and one panful of crumbed tomatoes drinks it dry. Add fresh fat between batches, or use butter cut with a neutral oil, and expect roughly five minutes a side over medium heat.
- A gillA gill is half a cup, so the half gill of oil for the Marseilles tomatoes is a quarter cup. "Sweet oil" means plain olive oil, not a peppery finishing one.
- "Very hot oven"Read that as 450-475F. The stuffed tomatoes only get eight minutes, so the oven has to be fully preheated or the crumbs will not colour. The "hot oven" for tomatoes on toast is 425-450F.
- Half a pinchThere is no fixing this one: the book measures in pinches and halves of pinches, which is not a fixed quantity. Season the cut faces lightly and taste the stuffing before it goes on, since the anchovies and butter already carry salt.
- The Marseilles stuffingChop the hard-boiled eggs fine and mash them into the ounce of softened butter first, then fold in the shallot, garlic, chives, parsley and anchovy. Worked that way it holds its shape on top of the tomato; stirred loosely it slumps off the sides in the oven.
- Fried parsleySprigs must be bone dry before they meet hot fat, and they need only a few seconds until the sizzling stops. Wet parsley spits violently.
- YieldSix to eight tomatoes serve six as a vegetable course or luncheon dish in any of the three versions. All three want to go out hot; none of them hold.
Oscar Tschirky's book gathers the standing repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century, which is why one page can hand you a plain skillet vegetable, a garlic-and-anchovy gratin and a bare tomato on toast without comment on the distance between them. Fried tomatoes were long-established American home cooking by 1896, a way of using firm fruit early or late in the season; the "Marseilles style" label is often taken as menu shorthand for the Provencal combination of garlic, olive oil, parsley and anchovy, in the same family as the tomatoes a la provencale of French professional cookery. The tomato is often said to have spent much of the early 1800s under American suspicion, though that story is contested folklore rather than established fact, and its arrival in a Waldorf kitchen in three different guises is at least a fair measure of how ordinary the fruit had become.