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Tomatoes, Trevise
Cut six even-sized, large, fresh red tomatoes in halves crosswise. Squeeze out the liquor into a saucepan, keeping the shells; add one gill tomato sauce, half gill claret, two ounces chopped cooked ham and half teaspoon finely chopped parsley. Place on fire and let reduce fifteen minutes, then add five tablespoons fresh bread crumbs; lightly mix. Remove from the fire, arrange tomatoes on a tin. Evenly season with half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon sugar and two saltspoons pepper. Evenly divide force in the twelve half tomatoes. Sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese over, arrange a few little bits butter on top, then set in oven twenty minutes. Remove, arrange on a hot dish and serve.
A straightforward stuffed tomato, but the original leaves out the oven temperature and uses two measures no modern cook keeps in a drawer.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one gill of tomato sauce is 1/2 cup and half a gill of claret is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making "two saltspoons pepper" half a teaspoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Around 375F for twenty minutes should suit: hot enough to brown the Parmesan without collapsing the shells.
- "Force"Short for forcemeat, meaning the stuffing. Divide it among the twelve halves after seasoning them, not before.
- The liquor and the reductionThis is the hinge. Squeeze the seeds and juice out of each half into the saucepan and reduce that mixture hard for the full fifteen minutes. If it is still loose when the crumbs go in, the filling will slump and weep in the oven.
- ClaretNineteenth-century shorthand for dry red Bordeaux. Any dry, unoaked red works; the quantity is small and it is there for acidity and depth, not fruit.
- Bread crumbs"Fresh" means soft crumbs torn from a day-old loaf, not dry packaged crumbs, which absorb far more liquid and turn pasty. Mix them in off the heat and lightly, as directed.
- Cooked hamTwo ounces of any firm cooked ham, finely diced rather than shredded. Prosciutto cotto or a boiled ham is closer to the original than a sweet-cured deli slice.
- Support in the ovenHalved tomatoes tip. Set them in a shallow baking dish or a muffin tin rather than flat on a sheet, and trim a thin slice off the base if they rock.
- YieldTwelve halves, serving six as a side dish or four as a light lunch course.
The name may point to Treviso, the town north of Venice better known to cooks for its long-leaved red chicory, though nothing in the recipe confirms the connection. The method itself is classic French garnish practice applied to an Italian vegetable, the tomato pulp reduced with wine and ham into a farce, bound with crumbs and gratinated with Parmesan. Stuffed tomatoes appear all over cookbooks of this period, and a hollowed half made a neat, cheap individual portion that could be assembled in advance and finished to order.