Julia Child’s Tomatoes à la Provençale (Tomatoes Stuffed with Bread Crumbs, Herbs and Garlic)

This recipe, adapted from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, is one I’ve been making since I was a teenager, looking for something to go with the leg of lamb my mom was making from the same volume. We wrote about them in an August 2020 story about tomatoes, part of our Summer Produce Special series.

I’ve tweaked Julia’s recipe slightly, allowing a substitution of panko for fine bread crumbs if you are in the mood for a more crunchy topping, increasing the amount of thyme in the filling and increasing the proportion of filling to tomato. (On the panko note, it works well, but I’ll probably use the fine bread crumbs nine times out of ten.)

Because I love Julia, I’ll share her entire charming headnote, from the book that will celebrate its sixtieth birthday next year:

“One of the most savory ways of serving tomatoes is à la provençale. These tomatoes go well with many things — steaks, chops, roast beef, lamb, roast or broiled chicken, broiled mackerel, tuna, sardines, herring or swordfish. They may also be a hot hors d’oeuvre, or accompany egg dishes.”

Amazing to see how the way we’ve eaten has changed since then. Sure, they’d still be great with roast chicken or a leg of lamb, but they’d just as likely be the centerpiece of a vegan dinner, served in summer with an eggplant dish, or chickpeas, or lentils, maybe a salad. For these you want the tomatoes to be ripe yet firm, and on the smallish side (about 3 inches in diameter). If you use larger tomatoes, you’ll want to increase the amount of filling (to be safe, I’d double it).

Makes 8 stuffed tomato halves.

Ingredients

4 firm, ripe, red tomatoes about 3 inches in diameter

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper

2 cloves garlic, crushed through a press

4 tablespoons minced shallots or scallions

4 tablespoons minced basil and parsley, or parsley only

1/2 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves

1/2 cup fine bread crumbs or panko

1/4 cup olive oil, plus additional for drizzling

Instructions

1. Heat the oven to 400 degrees F, with a rack In the upper third. Remove the stems from the tomatoes, cut them in half cross-wise, and gently press out the juice and seeds. Sprinkle the halves lightly with salt and pepper.

2. In a small mixing bowl, combine the garlic, shallots or scallions, basil and/or parsley, thyme, 1/4 teaspoon of salt, a few grinds of black pepper and the bread crumbs or panko. Mix them well, then stir in the olive oil. Taste and adjust seasoning if necessary.

3. Place the tomato halves on a rimmed baking sheet or in a roasting pan (do not crowd them), and fill each with some of the mixture. Bake in the upper third of the oven for 10 to 15 minutes, or until the tomatoes are tender but hold their shape, and the bread crumb filling has browned lightly.

Recipe notes

• Julia Child’s original recipe calls for 6 tomatoes, but the amount of filling it yields fills them skimpily. Perhaps that was intentional, and they were meant to be flat, but he filling is so good that we like it heaped a bit. Therefore we use Julia’s amount of filling to stuff only 8 tomato halves rather than 12.

• In a lifetime of making this dish, I’ve never used scallions, only shallots. That’s because the shallots are so good in this filling. I’m guessing scallions would be wonderful too, and maybe one day I’ll try them, but I always look forward to that shallot flavor.

• The original recipe specifies fresh basil and parsley, but and 1/8 teaspoon thyme, without specifying fresh or dried. (I’m guessing she was using dried, as the amount was so small.) We adjusted to 1/2 teaspoon fresh.

• The original recipe calls for “fine, white, dry bread crumbs” — which is what we’ve usually used. However, recently we tested it using panko (shown in the photograph here), which added a pleasant crunch.