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Stuffing for Tomatoes
Melt a tablespoon butter in a saucepan, add four sound, peeled and finely chopped shallots, and while cooking mix well rather briskly for one minute. Add the scooped-out "tomato meat," three good-sized finely chopped mushrooms, the meat of two raw sausages, half a bean of garlic finely chopped, one teaspoon chopped parsley and a teaspoon chopped chives. Season with half a light teaspoon salt, half saltspoon white pepper, and two saltspoons sugar. Mix all well while cooking for three minutes, then add three tablespoons fresh bread crumbs and one raw egg yolk. Thoroughly mix for two minutes, then place in a bowl to cool off. Stuff the tomatoes evenly with it.
A French-style forcemeat for stuffed tomatoes, built on shallots and a rough duxelles. The recipe stops at the stuffing, so a few blanks need filling.
- The filling is not cooked throughThree minutes in the pan will not cook raw sausage meat or set the egg yolk. The stuffed tomatoes must be baked until the centre of the filling reaches 165F — roughly 25 to 30 minutes at 375F, uncovered, in a buttered dish.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the pepper is an eighth of a teaspoon and the sugar half a teaspoon, a quantity that would balance the acidity of the tomatoes rather than sweeten them.
- Bean of garlicA clove. Half a clove, finely chopped, in a filling this size — Filippini's garlic is a background note, not a flavour.
- Two raw sausagesLink sausages of the period were often smaller than what is sold now; about 4 oz of bulk sausage meat total is a reasonable working figure. Plain pork sausage meat works; anything heavily seasoned with sage or fennel will pull the dish away from its French register.
- ShallotsFour shallots is right if they are the small single-lobe kind. With the large banana shallots common now, two is nearer the mark.
- Fresh bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn from a day-old loaf, not dry packaged crumbs, which will drink the tomato juices and turn the filling pasty. Add more only if the mixture will not hold a shape.
- Cooling before stuffingWorth observing. Cooled filling packs neatly and holds its shape in the shell.
- YieldThe quantities suggest enough for roughly half a dozen medium tomatoes, though the recipe gives no number. Salt the hollowed shells lightly and invert them for ten minutes to drain, or the finished dish sits in a pool of liquid.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) reflects a chef trained in the French idiom writing for American households. The mushroom-shallot base here is a shortcut duxelles, the classic French preparation of finely chopped mushrooms sweated with shallot, and its combination with sausage meat and crumbs is standard farce practice — the same filling would serve for mushrooms, onions or courgettes with little change. By Filippini's day the tomato was long established as a summer staple in American kitchens. Stuffed vegetables of this kind were often served as accompaniments to roast meats, which may be why Filippini gives the stuffing alone and assumes the cook knows what to do with it.