No. 2835

Tomatoes, Provencal Style-Stuffed

Tomates Farcies a la Provencale

Tomatoes for stuffing must be selected of uniform size; cut off the tops an inch and a half in diameter, extract all the seeds, salt the insides and then drain; fill them with the following preparation: Fry some finely chopped onions in oil with a little crushed garlic and finely chopped mushrooms; when these have rendered up their moisture add chopped parsley, moisten with espagnole sauce (No. 414) and meat glaze (No. 402), season and thicken with bread-crumbs. Fill the tomatoes, range them on a baking tin, cover the tops with bread-crumbs, pour oil over and bake for half an hour in a moderate oven.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's stuffing is essentially a dry duxelles bound with sauce and crumbs. The whole dish hinges on driving the moisture out — of the tomatoes and of the mushrooms — before anything goes in the oven.

Moderate oven"Moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F; bake for the half hour specified. If the tops are not browned by then, finish briefly under the broiler rather than extending the bake, or the shells collapse.
Salt and drain, properlySalt the hollowed shells and stand them upside down on a rack for 20-30 minutes. Skipping it is why stuffed tomatoes turn out watery.
Espagnole and meat glazeBoth are separate, long preparations in this book: espagnole is a brown stock sauce thickened with roux, meat glaze is stock reduced to a syrup. A few tablespoons of good reduced brown stock, or commercial demi-glace loosened with water, stands in for both. The quantity is left to judgment — add just enough to bind, perhaps 3-4 tablespoons for six tomatoes.
Cook the mushrooms hard"When these have rendered up their moisture" means keep them on the heat until the pan is dry and the mushrooms begin to catch. Underdone mushrooms will weep into the shells during baking.
CrumbsDried, not fresh, and fine. They are doing structural work in the filling as well as forming the crust; fresh crumbs absorb the sauce and go pasty.
The oilProvencal style means olive oil throughout, both for the frying and poured over the tops. Ranhofer does not specify quantity; a tablespoon or so drizzled across a tinful is enough to brown the crumbs.
Yield and servingFigure two tomatoes per person as a vegetable course or side. They are best served warm rather than hot.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is built like a reference work: nearly every recipe cross-references numbered sauces and stocks kept standing in a professional kitchen, which is why a home cook reading No. 2835 is suddenly sent off to No. 414 and No. 402. The dish itself is a straightforward reading of a la provencale, a nineteenth-century French kitchen tag that in practice meant olive oil, garlic and tomato — the garlic in particular still carried a faint whiff of the rustic South in Parisian and New York dining rooms of the period. The stuffing is a duxelles, the chopped mushroom-and-onion preparation generally credited to the seventeenth-century household of the Marquis d'Uxelles and long attributed to his cook La Varenne, here enriched with brown sauce in a way that is pure restaurant thinking: the labour is already done, sitting in a pot on the stove.