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September 10
Menu: Braised Ox Tails with Chestnuts; Boiled Sweet Potatoes; Baked Stuffed Tomatoes; Lima Bean Salad; Peach Chartreuse; a; Coffee Baked Stuffed Tomatoes-Prepare tomatoes by scooping out centers. Put into basin 1 cup crumbs, season with salt and pepper, 1 dozen chopped olives, 2 tablespoons chopped capers, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 1 tablespoon Crisco, beaten yolks 3 eggs, and moisten with stock. Fill tomatoes and set in hot oven to bake. Sprinkle top with crumbs and dot with Crisco.
A September entry from the Crisco calendar, written for cooks who already knew how to stuff a tomato. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- CriscoThe hydrogenated vegetable shortening the book exists to sell. Any solid vegetable shortening works as written; butter gives better flavour in a dish this savoury and behaves the same way in the filling and on top.
- A hot ovenPeriod cookery writing generally puts a hot oven somewhere in the region of 400-450F. Towards the top of that range, 20-25 minutes should brown the crumb topping before the fruit collapses; nearer 400F allow closer to 30 minutes.
- CrumbsThe recipe does not say which, but "moisten with stock" points to dry breadcrumbs rather than fresh, and not the fine sandy commercial kind. The cup of crumbs plus three yolks plus stock should come together as a moist but scoopable stuffing, not a batter.
- StockAdd it a spoonful at a time. A cup of dry crumbs will usually take two to four tablespoons; the yolks contribute liquid too, and an over-wet filling will slump out of the tomato as it bakes.
- SaltA dozen olives and two tablespoons of capers bring a great deal of salt. Season the crumbs lightly, taste the filling before it goes in, and correct at that point.
- Preparing the shellsAfter scooping, salt the insides and stand the tomatoes upside down for fifteen minutes to drain. Tomatoes hold more water than the recipe allows for, and the released juice is what makes stuffed tomatoes watery.
- Support in the panSet them in a dish that holds them close together, or in muffin cups. Freestanding tomatoes split and tip once the skins soften.
- YieldThe filling should stretch to roughly four to six medium tomatoes, depending on how deeply they are hollowed.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after the company introduced Crisco itself, and its recipes were written by Marion Harris Neil to demonstrate that a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening could stand in for butter, lard and suet in every part of the meal. The book's "Calendar of Dinners" section arranges menus by date, which is why this stuffed tomato carries the date September 11 rather than a chapter heading; September falls late in the outdoor tomato season across much of the United States. The filling itself, bound with egg yolk and sharpened with olives and capers, belongs to a wider Anglo-American fashion for stuffed vegetables that ran through late Victorian and Edwardian cookery, where a savoury forcemeat of crumbs and chopped relishes turned a garden glut into a course fit for company.