Tomato Salad
Wash garden cress and shake dry, arrange a bed on large oval platter, discarding all coarse leaves and stems. Peel and chill five uniform-sized tomatoes, cut a slice from the stem ends and scoop out the pulp, invert tomato cups on a plate and set aside in a cool place. Chop fine the solid pulp of the tomato with one chilled and pared cucumber, add two tablespoons finely chopped chives, stir in one cup of Cream Dressing and refill tomato cups with mixture heaping them in pyramids. Dispose these tomato cups at intervals in cress border and place mold of pressed chicken in center.
A composed salad platter of the kind that anchored a Sunday cold table: five stuffed tomato cups on a green bed, with a molded meat centerpiece. The assembly is simple; the difficulty is keeping it from going watery.
- Drain the cups, and the fillingScooped tomato shells weep. Salt the insides lightly, invert them on a rack or a folded towel for 20-30 minutes in the refrigerator, then fill just before serving. The chopped pulp should also be drained in a sieve, or the dressing loosens into pink soup on the platter.
- Garden cressThis is Lepidium sativum, peppery and small-leafed, sold as curly cress or sometimes mustard cress. Watercress is the usual substitute and gives the same sharpness against the cream dressing; baby arugula also works. Any of these bruise easily, so dry them gently rather than spinning them hard.
- Cream DressingThe capitals point to a separate dressing recipe in the book. Period cream dressings are usually either a cooked (boiled) dressing enriched with cream or an uncooked cream-and-vinegar dressing; in either case not whipped cream and not modern bottled mayonnaise. A boiled salad dressing, or a mayonnaise thinned with a few tablespoons of cream and sharpened with a little vinegar, will sit correctly with the tomato.
- Peeling the tomatoesNo method is given, though blanching was the standard one: dip in boiling water 15-30 seconds, then into cold, and the skins slip. Use firm, ripe tomatoes of even size, as the recipe specifies, so the cups hold their walls.
- The cucumberThe recipe asks only that it be chilled and pared. If your cucumber is seedy or bitter, halve it and scrape out the seed core before chopping, then salt the dice for ten minutes and pat dry. English or Persian cucumbers need only the seeding.
- Pressed chicken in the centerReferred to as though a recipe for it stands elsewhere in the book. Pressed chicken of the period is poached chicken chopped and set in its own reduced, gelatinous stock, chilled in a mold and sliced. Any cold molded or sliced poultry serves the same structural purpose. If you skip it, the platter reads as five tomatoes on greens and wants a second element.
- YieldFive stuffed tomatoes, so five servings as a salad course, or the whole platter as a light supper for four with bread.
- Chill everythingThe instruction to chill the tomatoes and the cucumber is repeated for a reason. This salad is built on temperature contrast and firmness; assembled warm it collapses within minutes.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was written by Elizabeth O. Hiller and published with the backing of a baking-powder company, and it belongs to a genre of American cookery that treated the Sunday table as a small performance. The stuffed tomato cup was one of the era's favorite devices, appearing widely in menus and cookbooks around the turn of the century, valued because it turned a salad into an individually portioned, upright, decorative object at a moment when presentation counted for a great deal. The cress border and the central mold follow the same decorative logic. That the filling is chopped tomato pulp bound with a cream dressing rather than oil and vinegar is in keeping with the period's fondness for thick, pale boiled and cream dressings.