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Tomatoes, Florentine
Wipe six fresh red tomatoes, cut a cover off top of each, with a spoon scoop out the interiors and place meat in demi-glace pot. Season shells with a half teaspoon each salt, pepper and sugar, all evenly divided. Remove stalks and thoroughly wash a quart fresh spinach, place in a saucepan with one quart boiling water, one teaspoon salt, and boil for ten minutes. Drain on a sieve, press out water with skimmer, chop up very finely, then place in small saucepan with a half ounce butter, egg yolk, three saltspoons salt, two saltspoons pepper and half saltspoon grated nutmeg. Briskly stir on the fire for three minutes. Remove, fill up tomato shells with spinach, place covers on, arrange on a tin, place a very little bit on top of each and set in oven for twenty minutes, remove, dress on a hot dish and serve.
A straightforward stuffed tomato, but the wording assumes a professional kitchen of about 1910 and several of the measures are no longer in common use.
- "Demi-glace pot"This is not an ingredient in the dish. Filippini is telling the cook to tip the scooped-out tomato pulp into the stock pot where the demi-glace is going, so nothing is wasted. At home, keep the pulp for a sauce or soup, or discard it.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the spinach takes about 3/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper and 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg.
- Boiling the spinachTen minutes in salted water was standard then and will leave you with olive-drab mush. One to two minutes in the boiling water is enough for the leaves to collapse; drain and press hard, since wet spinach makes a slack filling.
- A quart of spinachMeasured as loose raw leaves this is a modest amount, perhaps 4 ounces, which cooks down to very little; if your leaves pack light you may need more than the stated quart to fill six shells.
- The egg yolkOne yolk is meant. It binds the filling, so keep the pan moving over moderate heat for the three minutes and take it off before it scrambles.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Twenty minutes suits a moderately hot oven, 375-400F, long enough to heat the filling through without the shells slumping.
- "A very little bit on top"The recipe does not say of what; butter is the likeliest reading. A quarter teaspoon on each tomato is plenty.
- Draining the shellsThe recipe does not call for it, but standing the seasoned shells cut side down for a few minutes will draw out water that would otherwise pool under the filling.
- YieldSix tomatoes, one each as a first course or vegetable side.
"Florentine" on a menu means spinach, and generally with butter and nutmeg, as here. The label is traditionally traced to Catherine de' Medici, who is said to have brought Florentine cooks and a fondness for spinach to the French court in the sixteenth century; the story is repeated far more often than it is documented, but the naming convention it explains was firmly fixed in French professional kitchens by the nineteenth century and passed straight into American hotel cooking. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, wrote for exactly that world, which is why a home reader is casually told to put the tomato pulp in the demi-glace pot as though one were simmering on the range. Stuffed tomatoes were fashionable in this period for the same reason they are now: the shell is its own serving dish, and the garnish counts as a vegetable course.