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Tomatoes, American
Cut six even-sized, medium, fresh red tomatoes into even halves crosswise, squeeze out seeds, place on a tin, and season evenly with a teaspoon each salt and sugar and half teaspoon white pepper. Soak an ounce of the soft part of a French loaf in cold milk for five minutes, squeeze out all milk from it and place bread in a bowl. Add to it one and a half ounces finely chopped raw beef marrow, a half teaspoon chopped parsley, six finely chopped shallots, a half saltspoon thyme and one egg yolk. Sharply stir the whole well together for two minutes, evenly spread preparation over the twelve half tomatoes, set in oven to bake for twenty minutes, remove and serve.
A classic stuffed-tomato preparation built on a panade — bread soaked in milk — bound with egg yolk and enriched with raw beef marrow. Two things decide the outcome: draining the tomatoes properly and getting real marrow.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Twenty minutes for tomato halves implies a fairly hot oven; something around 400F is a reasonable modern reading if you want them to soften without collapsing.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the thyme here is about an eighth of a teaspoon — a pinch of dried leaf, not a branch.
- Beef marrowAn ounce and a half of raw marrow, scraped from split beef leg bones. Ask a butcher for marrow bones and pry it out with a knife handle; chilling the bones first makes it firmer and easier to chop fine. If marrow is unavailable, finely chopped beef suet or cold butter gives the same richness, though not the same silkiness.
- The soft part of a French loafThat is the crumb, no crust — about an ounce, roughly a cup loosely packed. Soak, then squeeze hard: a wet panade makes a topping that slumps off the tomato.
- Squeezing out seedsDo this thoroughly, and salt the cut halves a few minutes before topping them so they shed liquid onto the pan rather than into the stuffing.
- Six shallotsSix here is perhaps two tablespoons chopped; two modern shallots is closer to the intent, and more than that and the topping tastes of onion and little else.
- "Place on a tin"A rimmed baking sheet, lightly oiled or buttered. The tomatoes should sit clear of one another so they roast rather than steam.
- Stirring two minutesNot idle instruction — beating the marrow, yolk and bread hard emulsifies the fat so the topping browns and holds together instead of leaking grease.
- YieldTwelve halves, a side dish for four to six, or a first course for six.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, a sprawling turn-of-the-century compendium arranged alphabetically by dish with national qualifiers, and the label "American" is doing more work than the recipe supports: bread soaked in milk, chopped shallots, thyme, parsley and raw beef marrow is the standard French kitchen's tomates farcies, marrow being the same enrichment cooks spread on toast to finish a steak Bordelaise. Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, where French technique was the house language. The recipe is also a small marker of the tomato's place in the kitchen: earlier in the nineteenth century it was often said to have been regarded with suspicion in English-speaking kitchens and cooked at length, a wariness that had largely faded by mid-century, and by 1900 it appears here as a firm, fresh vessel worth only twenty minutes in the oven.