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Tomatoes a La Charlotte
Cut three medium-sized tomatoes in halves and bake them in a moderate oven for twenty-one minutes. Make two slices of buttered toast; cut this in six small rounds, according to the number of tomatoes to be served; place half a tomato on each round, cover with onion sauce and sprinkle with fried bread crumbs. Heat for three minutes in the oven. The onions for the sauce should be boiled and sieved and added to a gill of plain white sauce. This is a nice little vegetable entree.
A straightforward vegetable entrée that hinges on the onion sauce; the tomato halves are barely more than a warm base for it. Everything can be prepared ahead and assembled at the last minute.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is usually taken as about 350-375F. The oddly precise twenty-one minutes is really "until the tomatoes are soft but still holding shape" — check at 15 minutes if they are small or very ripe.
- A gillHalf a cup. That is the finished quantity of white sauce before the onion purée goes in, which makes a fairly thick sauce once the onions are added — enough for six halves.
- Plain white sauceA béchamel without seasoning beyond salt and pepper: roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked together, then half a cup of milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Season it properly; the recipe assumes you will.
- Boiled and sieved onionsOne medium onion, simmered in salted water or milk until wholly tender, then pushed through a sieve. A food mill or a short burst in a blender does the same work. Drain well or the sauce will slacken.
- Fried bread crumbsFresh crumbs tossed in butter in a skillet until golden and dry, not dry packaged crumbs. Made in advance they keep crisp for a day in a covered tin.
- The toast roundsCut with a cutter slightly smaller than the tomato halves so the sauce runs over the edge rather than pooling. Toast just before assembly — the final three minutes in the oven will not rescue toast that has already gone limp under a wet tomato.
- YieldSix rounds, which is two portions as a light entrée or six as a passed savoury.
The name is often said to borrow "charlotte" for anything built on a base or case of bread — the sweet apple charlotte is lined with buttered bread, and a savoury dish set on buttered toast rounds could claim the same family resemblance — though this derivation is traditional rather than documented. Dishes of this kind, small, hot, and served on a crouton or toast round, filled the entrée and savoury courses of the late Victorian and Edwardian table, where a vegetable was expected to arrive dressed rather than plain. The insistence on sieving the onions is characteristic of the period's cooking, which favoured smooth purées, strained sauces, and no visible texture.