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Stuffed Tomatoes
Wash and dry well six fine, sound, good-sized red tomatoes. Cut through the top of each, without detaching, so that it will serve as a cover. Scoop out the inside of each tomato with a vegetable scoop, being careful not to cut the skins, and lay them on a plate. Season the interior with half a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper equally divided. Then fill each tomato with a tomato stuffing and close down the covers. Lightly butter a tin plate and lay them on it; spread half a teaspoon melted butter on top of each; arrange them on a roasting tin and place in a moderate oven to bake for sixteen minutes.
A straightforward baked stuffed tomato from a book that assumes you have already turned to its stuffing recipe. A few of its measurements and vessels need translating.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon divided among six tomatoes. That is a generous but not unreasonable amount of pepper for the quantity.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F. The book gives no temperatures; 'moderate' covered roughly 350-375F in period usage, and a thermometer saves the guesswork.
- The stuffing must already be cookedSixteen minutes in a moderate oven is enough to soften a tomato shell and heat a filling through, nothing more. Whatever goes inside needs to be fully cooked before it is spooned in, particularly if it contains sausage or other raw meat.
- Vegetable scoopA melon baller or a sturdy teaspoon. Leave the shell about a quarter inch thick; any thinner and it collapses in the oven, any thicker and it will not soften in sixteen minutes.
- Salt them and waitThe recipe seasons the interior and fills immediately. Salting the hollowed shells and standing them upside down on a rack for ten minutes draws out water that would otherwise flood the pan and dilute the stuffing.
- Tin plate and roasting tinA buttered shallow metal pan set on a larger roasting tray. A single rimmed baking sheet will do both jobs. Set the tomatoes close enough to prop each other up.
- TomatoesRound slicing tomatoes, firm and slightly underripe. Large modern beefsteak varieties are bigger and wetter than the fruit likely assumed here and will need longer, with more risk of slumping.
- YieldSix tomatoes, one apiece as a side dish or a light lunch course. Serve them within a few minutes of leaving the oven; they weep and soften as they stand.
The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its ambition was encyclopaedic — several thousand short preparations arranged so a professional could find one at a glance. That is why the stuffing is not spelled out here: it lives in its own entry elsewhere in the book, and the reader is expected to work by cross-reference, as a cook in a restaurant kitchen would. The technique itself — scooping a vegetable, seasoning the cavity, refilling it with a seasoned crumb mixture and returning it to the heat — is much older, and is found across French, Provençal and wider Mediterranean cooking, where the same treatment is given to courgettes, onions and peppers.