The Spirit of Seventy-Six!
In honor of the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence, all recipes through July 4, 2026 will be from Centennial and Bicentennial cookbooks and the 1796 first American cookbook. Enjoy this look at the (gastronomic) spirit of ’76 as we head into the sestercentennial!
I’ve also published a Sestercentennial Cookery with recipes and photos.
This is a very easy and extraordinarily delicious use for tomatoes. The butter and spices slip down into the tomato; the tomato holds its shape after baking but is easily sliced. I’ve seen variations on this in more modern cookbooks, but they’re all more complex and involve more ingredients. This simple ancestor to such recipes is worth it on its own.
That said, adding a bit of sliced or crushed garlic to each tomato is not a bad thing either.
The original instructions, I think, have a typo. The original recipe in the Centennial Cook Book and General Guide calls for:
Five or six tomatoes; a saltspoonful of salt; half as much of pepper; a piece of butter the size of a nutmeg.
The instructions go on to say:
…put a little salt, pepper, and a piece of butter the size of a nutmeg in each…
It really sounds like the (about a quarter teaspoon) of salt, and the pepper, are portioned out from the total. But then the butter is the same amount as in the ingredient list. I tried it with 1-½ tablespoons of butter, which is supposedly about “the size of a nutmeg”, and that is a lot of butter. On the other hand, ¾ tsp of butter is not much at all. A half tablespoon butter per tomato seems to work very well.
These are also great if you have a covered grill you can control the temperature on.
The more you know about food, the more you can enjoy life. — Elizabeth Gordon (Cuisines of the Western World)