Quartered Tomatoes

Tomates en quartiers (quartered tomatoes) teach the discipline of the garde-manger (cold kitchen): a cold preparation succeeds or fails at the cut. The tomato must be firm, dry inside, and filled with a Macédoine (small mixture of young vegetables) bound in mayonnaise collée (mayonnaise lightly set with jelly). If the filling slumps under the knife, the whole little ceremony is lost.

The original entry assumed prepared jelly, a cold larder, crushed ice, and enough hands to peel and fill a trayful. At home, powdered gelatin melted into clear vegetable stock supplies the jelly, the refrigerator replaces the bed of ice, and four tomatoes make sixteen bites. One cook, one stove, one evening. The grooved piping bag is brigade scaffolding for the compound-butter version and can go here. Peeling, emptying, setting, and cutting are the dish, and they stay.

The finished quarters are scarlet and cool, their cut faces showing peas, green beans, carrot, and turnip held in pale, glossy mayonnaise. Chill the filled tomatoes until their centres resist a gentle press before you cut. That set is the one step that matters most, and if the knife drags, ça se rattrape: give them fifteen more minutes in the cold.