Julia Child's Tomatoes à la Provençale — Cooks Without Borders

This classic vegan recipe is adapted from Julia Child

Where shall we go? What shall we cook? Cooks Without Borders is Leslie Brenner's interactive, personal blog about cooking through the world's cuisines. In your kitchen, you're a citizen of the world. Cooks Without Borders features recipes, stories, photographs and cookbook reviews from Leslie Brenner, a cookbook author, former Los Angeles Times Food Editor, and currently restaurant critic at the Dallas Morning News, along with posts and recipes from guest bloggers. © 2015, 2016 by Leslie Brenner.

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.)