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Stuffed Tomatoes
Wipe four large tomatoes with a soft cloth, cut a small round off the top of each one with a sharp knife, and scoop out as much of the inside as can be removed without spilling the shape of the tomato. Mix with the scooped out center of the tomatoes about one-fourth pound of finely-minced ham, one teaspoonful of sugar, three small onions, chopping the latter very fine, a dessertspoonful of vinegar, a sprig of thyme and a seasoning of salt, cayenne and pepper. Put all these together into a small fryingpan over the fire, and stir the mixture until the liquid is somewhat reduced--about ten or fifteen minutes will be long enough. Then pass it through a fine sieve, and fill the emptied tomatoes with it. Bake them for a short time in a hot oven. Lay a small piece of butter on top of the mixture in each tomato when they are placed in the oven. Serve them very hot on the dish in which they were baked.
A straightforward stuffed tomato, though the instruction to sieve the filling is the step most cooks will want to think about before starting.
- The sieving stepPressing a mixture of minced ham and onion through a fine sieve is slow work and yields a coarse paste rather than a smooth one. A food mill with the medium plate does the same job in a minute; alternatively, mince everything finely enough at the start and skip the sieve, which gives more texture but loses nothing in flavour.
- A hot oven425-450F. The shells are already soft and the filling already cooked, so the oven is only setting the tops and heating things through: 12 to 18 minutes is ample, and longer will collapse the tomatoes into the dish.
- DessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons. It sits between the teaspoon and the tablespoon in period measure and turns up constantly in books of this era.
- The hamCooked ham, minced fine, not raw pork. A quarter pound is about 115 g, which is generous for four tomatoes and makes the dish a light lunch rather than a garnish.
- Draining the shellsSalt the hollowed tomatoes lightly and stand them upside down for ten minutes before filling. This keeps the finished dish from swimming.
- Reducing the fillingTen to fifteen minutes over moderate heat should leave the mixture thick enough to mound. If it is still loose, keep going -- a wet filling will not hold once the tomato walls soften in the oven.
- Cayenne and pepper bothThe recipe calls for each separately, as many books of the period do; black pepper contributes aroma, cayenne heat. A pinch of cayenne is enough for four tomatoes.
- Yield and serviceFour tomatoes, serving four as a first course or vegetable alongside roast meat. The instruction to serve in the baking dish is practical -- baked tomatoes rarely survive being lifted onto a platter.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s, and the 1896 Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf is less a record of what the hotel served than an enormous general compendium -- some nine hundred pages covering everything a large kitchen might be asked for. By this date the tomato was a well-established summer staple in American kitchens, and recipes for stuffing and baking them appear across late nineteenth-century household books, often with breadcrumbs; the ham-and-onion version here resembles the French tomates farcies familiar to a hotel kitchen of this kind. The vinegar and the teaspoon of sugar give the filling a sweet-sour edge of a sort that turns up frequently in American savoury cooking of the 1890s.