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Tomatoes, Carolina
Neatly wipe six even, medium, fresh red tomatoes. Cut off a piece from the top of each as a cover, scoop out the interior, and place the scooped-out meat in the demi-glace pot. Season the inside of tomatoes with a half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, three saltspoons sugar, and keep on a plate until required.
Place two ounces of raw Carolina rice in a small saucepan, add one ounce finely chopped, lean, raw ham, a teaspoon finely chopped onion, and moisten with three gills white broth. Season with three saltspoons salt and two saltspoons white pepper, lightly mix, cover the pan, boil for ten minutes, then set in the oven for forty-five minutes. Remove, add an ounce butter and two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese. Mix well and with this preparation fill up the six scooped tomatoes. Cover them, arrange on a tin, lightly baste the surface with a little melted butter, set in the oven for fifteen minutes, remove, dress on a dish and serve.
A straightforward stuffed tomato, but the measurements are in saltspoons and gills and the oven temperature is never named. A few conversions and one adjustment to the liquid make it work.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is 1/2 tsp and three is 3/4 tsp. A gill is half a cup, so three gills is 1 1/2 cups of broth.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given anywhere. Treat both stages as a moderate oven, 350F: forty-five minutes for the covered rice, fifteen for the filled tomatoes.
- Watch the liquidA cup and a half of broth to two ounces (about 1/3 cup) of raw rice is generous by modern standards. Keep the pan tightly covered and start checking at 25 minutes; you want a soft, moist, risotto-like filling rather than soup, and you can drain off any surplus before adding butter and cheese.
- Carolina riceIn period usage this means American long-grain rice, once synonymous with the Carolina Lowcountry crop. Any long-grain white rice serves; do not use parboiled or quick-cooking, which will not absorb the broth the same way.
- "Raw ham"Uncooked cured ham in the prosciutto or country-ham sense, finely diced. It cooks through with the rice. Pancetta or a lean piece of unsmoked bacon substitutes well; if you use a salty cured ham, hold back on the 3/4 tsp of salt in the rice.
- The demi-glace potFilippini assumes a professional kitchen with stock on the range, so the scooped-out tomato pulp goes into the sauce pot as a matter of thrift. At home, save the pulp for the broth you are about to use, or for a sauce, and add its juice to the rice pan.
- Salting and drainingSeason the hollowed shells as directed, then stand them cut side down on a rack for fifteen minutes. They shed water and hold their shape much better through the second baking.
- YieldSix tomatoes: a first course or light supper for three to six, depending on the rest of the meal. They are best warm rather than hot from the oven.
Alexander Filippini, who spent many years at Delmonico's in New York, built The International Cook Book (1906) around several thousand short entries of exactly this kind, a great many of them tagged with a nationality or a place. "Carolina" here labels the rice, not the dish: American long-grain rice from the South Carolina Lowcountry was, through the nineteenth century, a byword for quality in European and American kitchens, and "Carolina rice" appears on menus and in cookbooks as a grade name. The technique underneath reads as Italian, rice enriched at the end with butter and Parmesan and used to stuff a vegetable. The cultivation of the original Carolina Gold declined after the Civil War and was crippled by the coastal hurricanes of the 1890s and after; by the time this book was printed, the name on the page had begun to outlive the crop.