No. 2837

Tomatoes Baked

Tomatoes Gratinees

Remove the skins by plunging the tomatoes into boiling water; cut each one across in two, press out the seeds and lay them in a large frying pan with melted butter; season and reduce all their moisture. Range them in a buttered baking dish, the round parts on the bottom and scatter over cooked fine herbs, composed of shallot fried in butter with chopped mushrooms, chopped ham, parsley and bread-crumbs; pour butter or oil over and bake for fifteen minutes in a slack oven.

← No. 2836 Tomatoes a la Trevise Tomatoes, Corn & Garden Vegetables No. 2838 Tomatoes Broiled, Hot Mayonnaise Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a cook who already knows how to make a duxelles and reads "slack oven" as a number. Two clarifications and this works as written.

Slack ovenA slack oven is a cool one; Ranhofer gives no figures, but the term is usually rendered as somewhere around 300F. Fifteen minutes at that heat will set and warm the topping rather than brown it deeply. If you want colour, finish briefly under the broiler rather than raising the baking temperature and collapsing the tomatoes.
"Cooked fine herbs"Ranhofer's fines herbes cuites is not the modern raw herb blend. It is a cooked mixture — shallot softened in butter, then chopped mushrooms cooked until dry, with chopped ham, parsley and crumbs stirred in. Essentially a duxelles enriched with ham. Cook the mushrooms until the pan is dry or the topping will slump.
Pressing out the seedsHalve the tomatoes across the equator, not stem to base, then squeeze gently. This is what makes the halves sit as cups; cut the other way and they will not hold the stuffing.
Reducing the moistureThe pan-frying step before baking is the hinge. Tomatoes must give up their water in the frying pan over decent heat, or the baking dish fills with liquid and the crumb topping turns to paste. Expect several minutes per batch, and do not crowd the pan.
Round parts on the bottomThe cut side faces up, holding the herb mixture. Butter the dish well and set the halves close together so they support one another.
Seasoning"Season" here means at least salt and pepper. The ham brings its own salt, so season the tomatoes lightly and taste the herb mixture before it goes on.
Quantity and yieldNo amounts are given. Figure two medium tomatoes per person as a vegetable course, and about a cup of the cooked herb mixture — 6 oz mushrooms, 2 shallots, 2 oz ham, a handful of crumbs — for eight halves.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer spent over thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is the working record of that kitchen: a long run of numbered entries, cross-referenced so a cook could be sent to No. 2837 by number alone. The run of tomato preparations here shows how thoroughly the tomato had been absorbed into fine cooking in America by the 1890s, after decades of suspicion earlier in the century. The technique itself is straightforwardly French: gratinéed means finished with a browned crumb surface, and the ham-and-mushroom filling is a household variation on duxelles, the mushroom hash generally credited by tradition to the kitchen of the Marquis d'Uxelles in the seventeenth century. Delmonico's served vegetables as their own course, so a tomato dish could take a number of its own rather than being tucked under a roast.