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Baked Tomatoes
Wash, wipe and then cut in two; place them in a aking tin with the skin side down, and season with pepper and salt and place in a hot oven; take up carefully when done, and put bits of butter on each piece of tomato.
A four-line recipe that assumes you already know what a tomato wants. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the size of the halves, and how to keep them from collapsing into liquid.
- "A hot oven"In books of this era the phrase is usually read as somewhere around 425-450F. At that heat the cut faces caramelise before the tomatoes slump; much cooler and they are more likely to stew in their own juice.
- Skin side down is structuralThe skin is the only thing holding a halved tomato together once the pulp softens. Do not turn them, and do not crowd the pan or the escaping steam will keep the tops pale.
- TimingNot given in the original. Medium tomatoes halved across take 20-30 minutes at 425F; they are done when the edges are browned and the centre gives to a spoon but the half still lifts intact.
- "Baking tin" (the original reads "aking tin")A shallow rimmed sheet or a metal roasting tin, not a deep casserole. Shallow sides let the moisture evaporate, which is the whole point.
- Butter at the end, not the startThe original adds it only after the tomatoes come out of the oven, so the butter melts into the hot pulp rather than cooking in the tin. The quantity is not given; a small knob per half is enough.
- Salt draws waterSeason just before the tomatoes go into the oven. Salted and left to sit, they weep and then poach instead of roasting.
- YieldNot given. Two halves per person, one tomato each, works as a side dish.
Baked or broiled tomatoes turn up constantly in North American cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s, which is a marker of how recently the tomato had become respectable. Well into the first half of the nineteenth century it is often said to have been treated with suspicion in English-speaking kitchens -- a claim routinely overstated -- though early recipes do tend to cook it for a long time, as though the fruit needed correcting. By the time The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in the 1870s -- assembled from contributions by local women in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children -- the tomato had settled into the plain-cooking repertoire, and a recipe like this one needs no defence and offers no explanation. The brevity is the evidence: seasoning, heat, butter. Recipes only get this short once everyone already knows the dish.