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Baked Tomatoes
(Florentine style.) Take out the centres of 6 large tomatoes. Rub a clove of garlic across an earthen casserole, and fry in it an onion, chopped, in a spoonful of butter or olive oil. Add 6 mushrooms, 2 large livers of chickens, both minced finely, and a spoonful of lemon juice. Cook these, add yolks of 2 eggs and sufficient bread-crumbs. Fill the tomatoes, bake them 1/2 hour. CELERY (as cooked in Italy.).
Take off the roots and tops of 4 heads of celery. These can be used for flavoring soup. Parboil the celery, then cook it with 1 ounce butter, salt, pepper, a tablespoonful of minced ham, and a cup of white stock. When tender, strain the sauce, arrange the celery on pieces of toast, pour the sauce over, having added to it the yolk of an egg and a tablespoonful of grated cheese. Bake until brown.
Two Italian vegetable dishes given as one entry: tomatoes stuffed with a chicken-liver and mushroom farce, and braised celery finished with an egg-and-cheese sauce. Neither gives an oven temperature, and both depend on getting the binding right.
- The casseroleHere a "casserole" is evidently a shallow earthenware pan used on direct heat, since the recipe has you fry in it, rather than a covered baking dish; period usage covers both senses. Any heavy skillet or small saute pan does the work; the garlic rub is for perfume only and should not be left in.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Half an hour suits a moderate oven, 350-375F, which is long enough to soften the tomato shells without collapsing them. Sit them close together in a shallow dish so they hold their shape.
- The liver stuffingChicken livers should be trimmed of green or fibrous bits and cooked only until they lose their raw pink through the middle. They finish in the oven, so aim for just set in the pan; overcooked liver turns grainy and chalky in the filling.
- "Sufficient bread-crumbs"Enough dry crumbs to make a mixture that holds together when pressed on a spoon, roughly half to three-quarters of a cup for six tomatoes. Add them off the heat, then the yolks, or the eggs will scramble.
- Salt the shellsThe recipe omits it, but the hollowed tomatoes should be lightly salted and drained upside down for ten minutes, or the filling will finish watery. The scooped centres, sieved, are worth keeping for a sauce or soup.
- White stockA pale unroasted stock of veal or chicken. Low-sodium chicken stock stands in; remember the minced ham is already salty, so season at the end.
- Finishing the celery sauceThis is the hinge of the second dish. Beat the yolk and cheese into the strained sauce off the heat, and brown the assembled toasts quickly under a broiler or in a hot oven rather than baking them long. Held at a simmer with the yolk in, the sauce curdles.
- YieldSix stuffed tomatoes serve six as a first course or three as a light main. The celery, four heads, serves four.
Both dishes belong to the loosely codified repertoire of Italian vegetable cookery that late Victorian and Edwardian travel cookbooks brought home for English-speaking readers: recipes gathered abroad and rendered for a domestic kitchen. "Florentine style" in period cookbooks is applied inconsistently, sometimes meaning spinach, sometimes simply Tuscan; here it seems to point to the chicken-liver farce, which is genuinely Tuscan in character and close to the mixture spread on crostini di fegatini. The celery is the more revealing of the two: stalk celery was still a somewhat prized vegetable, sold in bunched heads with roots and leaves attached, and the instruction to save the trimmings for soup reflects a household economy in which nothing edible went out with the peelings. Finishing a braise by whisking an egg yolk and grated cheese into the strained cooking liquor is an old technique across Italy and France, generally thought to predate the flour-thickened sauces that came to dominate Anglo-American cooking.