No. 2834

Tomatoes a la Frossart

Tomates a la Frossart

From the stalk end of the tomatoes suppress with a pastry cutter a round piece an inch and a half in diameter; empty out the insides, drain and fill them with chicken forcemeat (No. 75), adding to it as much foies-gras from a terrine pressed through a sieve, truffles, mushrooms, chopped parsley, salt, pepper, nutmeg and grated parmesan. Fill the tomatoes through a pocket and bake them in a slack oven for fifteen minutes. Range them in a circle, pour Madeira sauce (No. 492) in the center and on each tomato lay a round piece of glazed truffle.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A stuffed-tomato garnish from Ranhofer's kitchen, written for cooks who already had forcemeat, truffles and Madeira sauce standing by. Translating it means supplying the three cross-referenced recipes and one temperature judgment.

"Slack oven"A low oven, generally reckoned somewhere in the region of 250-300F. Ranhofer gives no reason for the low heat; keeping the shells from collapsing is a plausible guess rather than his stated intent.
Fifteen minutes is not enoughA raw chicken forcemeat packed into a tomato will not reach 165F in a quarter hour at 300F. Expect 30-40 minutes, and check the center of the filling with a thermometer rather than the clock.
Chicken forcemeat (No. 75)A quenelle-type forcemeat of the usual kind: raw chicken pounded smooth, worked with panada and butter or cream, then sieved. Consult No. 75 itself for Ranhofer's actual proportions. A food processor will do the pounding and sieving in one pass if meat and cream are kept very cold.
Foies-gras from a terrineCooked, seasoned foie gras terrine, not raw liver. A block of mousse de foie gras sieved into the forcemeat gives the same effect. Ranhofer's "as much foies-gras" fixes no clear proportion, so whatever ratio you use is your own judgment, not his.
"Fill through a pocket"Pocket is Ranhofer's word for a piping bag. A plain half-inch tube fills the cavity without trapping air pockets that would weep during baking.
Truffles and mushroomsChopped black truffle and duxelles-fine mushroom. Preserved truffle in a jar is the practical modern equivalent; the "glazed truffle" on top is a slice warmed in a little reduced meat glaze until it shines.
Madeira sauce (No. 492)A demi-glace finished with Madeira and reduced. A good veal or beef stock reduced to a glossy sauce and seasoned with dry Madeira off the heat will serve.
TomatoesChoose firm, thick-walled, evenly sized fruit, salt the emptied shells and drain them upside down for 20 minutes, or the released juice will slacken the filling.
YieldWritten as a dressed garnish for a service platter. Figure one tomato per person as a first course, or two alongside a roast; a circle of eight makes a handsome dish.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his working reference: a thousand pages of numbered recipes that call on one another, so that a single garnish like this one silently assumes the forcemeat, the sauce and the truffle glaze are already in hand. Names ending "a la Frossart" generally commemorate a patron, a colleague or an occasion rather than a place or a technique, and in most cases the person behind them is now unidentifiable. What the dish records is the late nineteenth-century habit of treating the tomato as a vessel rather than a vegetable in its own right. Tomatoes had only become fully respectable in American cooking a few decades earlier, and the grandest restaurant use for them was to hollow them out and fill them with something more expensive: chicken quenelle forcemeat, foie gras, truffle. The Madeira in the sauce is a similar marker of the period, when the fortified wine still held a central place in the classical French sauce repertoire and on the American table.