SATELLITE TOMATOES

THIS RECIPE comes from Betty Crocker's Party Book, which was published in 1960. A few years earlier, in 1957, Russia launched a satellite called Sputnik into space, and so satellites were on everybody's mind in 1960. This was the time of something called the Space Race, when everybody was trying to build bigger and better spaceships, and so Betty Crocker's Party Book suggests doing an entire party based on a Space Age Adventure theme.

There really is not much to this recipe. You scoop out the insides of a tomato and then stick other vegetables into it, and it is supposed to look like a satellite. And it sort of does, as Sputnik was basically just a silver ball with four antennas sticking out of it. But mostly, the recipe just looks like a tomato with other vegetables stuck in it. We suspect it was a scheme by Betty Crocker to get children to eat their vegetables. This seems silly to us, as how many children looked at Sputnik flying through the night sky and though, wow, if I could just get a bite of that?

But, then, plain old veggies are a little dull on their own, and so why not make it a little more fun by sticking one veggie into another? It's very simple, really. You cut carrots, celery, and green onions into evenly sized pieces. Then you take out the guts of a tomato, poke a few holes in the side of the tomato, and then stick the other veggies in. We tried to make it look a little more like a satellite by putting a tea candle into the tomato, but the truth is that it just made the tomato look like a tomato-shaped candle with several other veggies sticking out of it. But we won't complain. That's certainly more interesting that just an ordinary tomato.