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Tomato and Cucumber Salad
Six fresh tomatoes.
Two cucumbers.
One onion.
One head of celery.
Three hard-boiled eggs.
Slice thin, and place by layers in a salad bowl, omitting the onion if not liked; add a dash of cayenne pepper, salt to taste and vinegar. One-half head cabbage.
Two cucumbers.
Two small onions.
Two heads crisp lettuce.
Three small gherkins.
A layered raw salad dressed with nothing but vinegar, salt and cayenne — closer to a relish plate than to what most people now call a salad. A few things need clarifying before you build it.
- The second ingredient listThe recipe as printed appears to run two salads together: the tomato-cucumber-celery-egg version is complete at "vinegar," and the cabbage-cucumber-onion-lettuce-gherkin list that follows has no method attached to it. Treat only the first list as the recipe; what was intended for the second list is not recoverable from the page.
- A head of celeryThis means the whole bunch, not a single rib. Celery of the period was often blanched and may have been smaller than a modern head; use about half a bunch, the paler inner ribs, sliced thin on the bias.
- The dressing is vinegar aloneNo oil, no sugar, no mustard. Cider vinegar is the likely intent; white wine vinegar works. Add it just before serving, or the tomatoes will weep and the layers collapse into a soup.
- Salt the cucumbers firstSlice, salt lightly, let stand twenty minutes, then drain and pat dry. This keeps the finished bowl from flooding — a real problem when the only dressing is thin vinegar.
- Cayenne quantity"A dash" here means an eighth of a teaspoon or less across the whole bowl. The point is a low heat behind the vinegar, not a chilli note.
- Peel or notThe recipe says nothing about peeling. Cucumbers of the period were often thick-skinned and could be bitter, and peeling was common; modern thin-skinned cucumbers do not need it.
- The eggsHard-boiled eggs are layered in, not chopped over the top. Cook them ten minutes, cool in cold water, and slice with a wet knife so the yolks stay whole.
- YieldSix tomatoes and two cucumbers make a large bowl, roughly eight side servings. It does not keep; assemble close to the time it is wanted.
Layered vinegar salads like this one belong to the period generally placed just before commercial mayonnaise and bottled dressings reshaped the American salad course. Through the nineteenth century a salad was typically raw vegetables sliced thin, seasoned with salt, pepper and vinegar at the table, sometimes with oil if the household kept good oil — imported olive oil being expensive and prone to rancidity. The tomato's presence is worth noting, though the often-repeated story that Americans long suspected raw tomatoes of being unwholesome is much contested, and raw tomato salads appear in American cookbooks well before 1900; cookbooks of this type list them without comment. The instruction to omit the onion "if not liked" is a small period courtesy that recurs across these books, and suggests only that tastes varied.