Home › Left-Over Vegetables › Corn in Tomato Cases
Corn in Tomato Cases
Remove most of the pulp from six medium-sized tomatoes. Rub the inside of the cases with salt, pepper, and a little softened butter. Fill them with one cup of stewed corn mixed with one tablespoonful of grated cheese. Cover lightly with buttered crumbs, place in an agate pan, and bake until the cases are tender but not broken.
A tidy way to use up a cup of yesterday's corn. The recipe assumes you know your oven, so the only real decisions left to you are heat, time, and how much moisture you let the tomatoes give off.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; recipes of this sort left heat to the cook's judgement. A moderate oven, around 375F for 20 to 25 minutes, is hot enough to brown the crumbs before the tomato walls collapse.
- Agate pan"Agate" is speckled grey enamelware over steel, the standard cheap bakeware of the period. Any shallow ceramic or metal baking dish works; choose one just large enough that the tomatoes brace each other upright.
- The hinge: drain the casesEverything depends on the tomatoes not weeping into the filling. After hollowing them, salt the insides and stand them upside down on a rack for 15 to 20 minutes, then blot dry before filling.
- Stewed cornCooked corn, whether cut from the cob and stewed or the tinned creamed-style corn then widely available. Either is fine, but drain it well; watery corn plus watery tomato gives you soup in a shell.
- Grated cheeseThe kind is not specified. Parmesan or a sharp aged Cheddar both suit; one tablespoon per cup of corn is restrained, and doubling it does no harm.
- Buttered crumbsDry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly two tablespoons butter to half a cup of crumbs. "Cover lightly" is deliberate: a thick lid of crumbs traps steam and keeps the tops pale.
- Reserved pulpThe recipe says remove "most" of the pulp and then forgets about it. Keep it for soup or a sauce; it will be a cup or two of good tomato.
- YieldSix tomatoes serve six as a side dish, or three as a light lunch course with bread.
Stuffed and baked tomato "cases" were a fixture of American cookery in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when tomatoes were plentiful in late summer and cooks were taught to treat a vegetable as an edible container. The framing matters as much as the dish: it belongs to the genre of thrift cookery that flourished in the decades either side of 1900, when middle-class households were being urged to account for every scrap of yesterday's dinner. A cup of stewed corn was not enough to serve on its own, but dressed with cheese and crumbs and set inside a fresh tomato it became a course. Grated cheese with a buttered crumb topping was a common finishing formula of the period, applied to scalloped potatoes, macaroni and creamed fish alike, and it did reliable work: browning, a little richness, and the appearance of intention.