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Baked Tomatoes
Cut a thin slice from blossom side of twelve solid, smooth, ripe tomatoes, with a tea-spoon remove pulp without breaking shell; take a small, solid head of cabbage and one onion, chop fine, add bread-crumbs rubbed fine, and pulp of tomatoes, season with pep. per, salt and sugar, add a tea-cup good sweet cream, mix well together, fill tomatoes, put the slice back in its place, lay them stem end down in a buttered baking-dish with just enough water (some cook without water), with a small lump of butter on each, to keep from burning, and bake half an hour, or until thoroughly done; place a bit of butter on each and serve in baking-dish. They make a handsome dish for a dinner-table. - Mrs. S. Watson, Upper Sandusky.
A straightforward stuffed tomato, but the original assumes you know your own oven and can judge a stuffing by eye. Two things need pinning down: the heat and the cabbage.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, as was normal in a wood-stove book. Bake at 350-375F; much cooler and the tomatoes may slump before the filling sets, much hotter and the shells are likelier to split.
- The cabbage is the hingeCoarsely chopped raw cabbage is unlikely to soften properly in half an hour inside a tomato. Chop it very fine — nearly minced — or sweat it with the onion in butter until limp before mixing. Otherwise the filling can stay crunchy and taste raw while the shells collapse.
- A tea-cup of creamA period tea-cup is usually reckoned at somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a modern cup, not a modern mug. Use heavy or whipping cream; "good sweet cream" means fresh and unsoured, in contrast to the sour cream also common in these kitchens.
- Bread-crumbs, unmeasuredAdd dry fine crumbs until the mixture holds together and mounds on a spoon rather than pouring. Roughly a cup for twelve tomatoes, but judge it against how juicy the pulp is.
- Blossom side and stem endThe blossom end is the smooth bottom, opposite the stem scar. You cut the lid from there, then set the tomatoes stem-side down so the flat scar acts as a base and the lid stays on top.
- Water in the dishA few tablespoons in the bottom of the buttered dish stops scorching in a hot cast-iron oven. In a modern oven it is optional, and skipping it gives a slightly firmer result.
- TimingHalf an hour is the minimum. Expect 35-45 minutes at 375F for tomatoes this size; they are done when the shells are wrinkled and a knife meets no resistance in the filling.
- YieldTwelve stuffed tomatoes serve six as a side dish, or four as a light supper with bread.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the great wave of American community and compiled cookbooks of the 1880s and 90s, in which recipes arrive signed — here Mrs. S. Watson of Upper Sandusky, an Ohio town, a reminder that "Dixie" in these titles was often a publisher's marketing decision rather than a description of the contributors. Stuffed and baked tomatoes appear in cookbooks throughout this period because tomatoes had by then shed their earlier reputation as suspect or medicinal and become a summer staple, cheap and abundant in August, when a solid head of cabbage was equally at hand. The pinch of sugar with the pepper and salt is characteristic of nineteenth-century American vegetable cookery, in which recipes of this kind often call for a little sugar to balance the tomatoes' acidity. The closing note — that the dish looks handsome on a dinner-table — tells you as much about its purpose as the ingredients do: served in the baking dish, filled and re-capped, it was a presentation vegetable for company.