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Corn in Tomato Cases
Select firm tomatoes of medium size; cut out the stem and remove the seeds and center pulp. Dust inside with flour, salt and pepper, and put a lump of butter in the bottom. Have ready corn cut from the ear that has been boiled and seasoned to taste, with which fill the cavities. Place a piece of butter on top, cover with a spoonful of cream sauce, bread crumbs and a few small bits of butter. Bake in a moderate oven about three-quarters of an hour. Serve with Bechamel sauce. This is a pretty dish for a nasturtium luncheon, for which occasion the sauce should have added to it the yolks of sufficient eggs to make it a bright yellow. Boiled rice can be substituted for the corn, in which case, serve with tomato sauce made from the parts removed.
A straightforward stuffed-tomato dish whose only real problem is the baking time. Everything else is a matter of translating turn-of-the-century sauce vocabulary.
- The time is the hingeThree-quarters of an hour will reduce a hollowed tomato to a puddle of skin and juice. Twenty-five to thirty minutes at 350F is enough to heat the filling through and brown the crumbs while the cases still hold their shape. Bake them in a dish just large enough to hold them upright and touching, so they support one another.
- "A moderate oven"350F. If the crumb topping is not colouring by the end, finish under the broiler for a minute rather than extending the bake.
- Cream sauce and BechamelBoth are the same family here: butter and flour cooked together, then milk or thin cream whisked in. The spoonful that goes over the filling should be thick enough to sit on top; the Bechamel served alongside can be looser. If you make one batch, hold back some of it and thin the rest.
- The egg yolksFor the yellow luncheon sauce, temper the yolks with a little hot sauce before returning them to the pan, and keep the pan off direct heat afterwards. Once yolks go in, boiling will scramble them.
- Corn quantityThe recipe assumes corn already cooked and seasoned, probably left from a previous meal. Four to five ears yields roughly two to two and a half cups of kernels, enough for six medium tomatoes. Frozen corn, thawed and drained well, behaves the same; canned corn is too wet unless thoroughly drained.
- Draining the casesAfter hollowing, salt the insides and invert them on a rack for fifteen minutes. The flour dusting the recipe calls for absorbs some liquid, but tomatoes vary enormously and a watery one will flood the filling.
- The rice variationCooked rice absorbs more liquid than corn, so pack it loosely. The tomato sauce made from the reserved pulp and seeds wants straining and reducing; the raw scrapings alone are thin and sharp.
- YieldSix tomatoes serve six as a side or a light luncheon course. It is a vegetable dish rather than a main.
The "nasturtium luncheon" named here is the giveaway that this is a book written for hostesses as much as cooks. The colour-themed ladies' luncheon was a fixture of American entertaining from the 1890s into the 1910s: a single flower set the palette, and the food was expected to fall in line, which is why the Bechamel gets yolks beaten into it purely to make it the bright yellow the recipe asks for. Nasturtium flowers and leaves are edible, and could be strewn over the table and the plates. The dish itself belongs to the broader vogue for stuffed and cased vegetables that ran through late Victorian cookery, where tomatoes, peppers and onions served as edible containers for whatever the larder held. Cutting corn from the ear was ordinary summer work, and this may well be a way of dressing up boiled corn well enough to put in front of guests.