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Tomato and Onion Salad
Arrange a nest of heart lettuce leaves in salad bowl; place in center three peeled and chilled tomatoes, cut in quarters; thinly slice a mild onion, separate the rings and strew them over tomatoes, sprinkle all with green and red peppers finely chopped. Serve with French Dressing.
A straightforward composed salad from a July menu, when tomatoes and sweet peppers were both at their peak. Almost nothing needs translating; a few choices do reward attention.
- YieldThree tomatoes on a bed of lettuce will serve about four as a side. Scale by counting roughly one tomato for every one to two people.
- Peeling the tomatoesThe instruction is not decorative fussiness — peeled tomatoes take dressing far better. Cut a shallow X in the base, drop into boiling water for 15 to 30 seconds, then into ice water, and the skins slip off. Chill thoroughly afterwards, as directed.
- "Heart lettuce"The pale inner leaves of a head lettuce, iceberg or butterhead. Little Gem or the heart of a romaine gives the same cupped shape, which is the point: the leaves form the nest that holds everything.
- Mild onionProbably a white, Spanish or Bermuda onion rather than a sharp yellow one. A sweet variety such as Vidalia or Walla Walla is closest. If all you have is sharp, soak the sliced rings in cold water for ten minutes and pat dry.
- Green and red peppersSweet bell peppers, seeded and finely chopped, used here for color as much as flavor. The recipe does not call for chile heat.
- French dressing of the periodNot the sweet orange bottled kind. In this period it generally meant a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing, commonly around three parts oil to one part vinegar, with salt and pepper, whisked and used at once.
- Dress at the tableTomatoes weep quickly once salted or acidulated. Assemble the bowl, chill it, and add the dressing just before serving or the lettuce collapses.
Composed salads like this one belong to a particular moment in American cooking, when the salad moved from a garnish to a course and the arrangement mattered as much as the eating. Cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s are full of instructions to build a "nest" of leaves and set the other ingredients in the center, a style simplified for a family Sunday table. The raw tomato itself was still a relative newcomer in this role — long grown in American gardens but well into the nineteenth century more often stewed, baked or cooked into ketchup than served cold and uncooked. That this recipe appears under July is the whole logic of the book: tomatoes, sweet peppers and head lettuce were all local, cheap and abundant at once, and a cook put them together in the month when she could actually get them.