Home › The World's Kitchen › Baked Tomatoes (Neatly wipe six medium sound)
Baked Tomatoes (Neatly wipe six medium sound)
Neatly wipe six medium, sound, red tomatoes and cut off a small piece of top of each. Place on a tin, season with a teaspoon salt, one teaspoon sugar and half teaspoon white pepper, evenly divided. Divide half ounce butter evenly on top of the tomatoes. Set in the oven and bake for twenty minutes. Remove, dress on a hot dish and serve with a small saucer for each person.
A plain baked tomato, and the original assumes you know your oven. A few numbers and one structural fix are all it needs.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Twenty minutes suits a hot oven of about 400F; at that heat medium tomatoes soften and blister without collapsing. At 350F allow 30 to 35 minutes.
- "On a tin"A flat baking sheet with no rim will let the juices run and burn. Use a shallow rimmed pan or a baking dish just large enough to hold the six tomatoes upright against one another.
- Half an ounce of butterAbout one tablespoon, so roughly half a teaspoon per tomato, dropped into the cut top. It is a modest amount by modern habit; doubling it is no loss.
- White pepperLikely chosen so no dark specks show on the red skin. Black pepper can be substituted, though the two do differ in flavour as well as appearance.
- The sugarA teaspoon across six tomatoes reads as a corrective rather than a sweetener, probably aimed at the acidity of under-ripe or out-of-season fruit. With good ripe summer tomatoes you can leave it out entirely.
- Cutting the topTake only a thin slice, enough to make a well for the butter and seasoning. Cut deeper and the tomato loses its walls and slumps into liquid.
- The small saucerProbably not a garnish instruction. Baked tomatoes release a good deal of juice, and the saucer would let each diner hold the tomato and its liquid so it did not flood the rest of the plate. A shallow bowl does the same job.
- YieldSix tomatoes, one per person as a side dish with roast or grilled meat.
Baked or broiled tomatoes appear widely in Anglo-American cookbooks from the 1870s onward, by which time the tomato was a summer staple; earlier English books more often stewed or scalloped them with breadcrumbs. What marks this version is its restraint - no crumbs, no cheese, no stuffing - which is characteristic of the hotel and restaurant cooking that Filippini's book draws on, where a vegetable was expected to arrive as itself alongside the meat. The pinch of sugar is a period reflex found throughout these books, an acknowledgement that tomatoes shipped or bought outside their brief season were sharp, and the individual saucer suggests, though it cannot prove, that this was written with table service in mind rather than for a family dish passed around.