Tomato Salad
Take the skin, juice, and seeds from nice, fresh tomatoes, chop what remains with celery, and add a good salad-dressing.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already own a salad dressing and know how to peel a tomato. The technique it describes is essentially tomato concassé: skin, seed and juice discarded, only the firm flesh kept.
- Peeling without a recipeThe book gives no method. Score the skins, drop them in boiling water for 20-30 seconds, then into ice water and the skins slip off. Very ripe summer tomatoes will peel with a serrated knife alone.
- Why the juice and seeds goRemoving them keeps the salad from turning into a puddle once salted. Skip it and the bowl is likely to pool with watery liquid soon after dressing.
- ProportionsNone are given. Roughly equal volumes of chopped tomato flesh and celery is a reasonable reading, with the celery cut fine so it does not dominate; something like two large tomatoes and two ribs of celery would make a side for four, but that is a guess, not the book's.
- The salad-dressingIn Buckeye Cookery a "good salad-dressing" would most likely mean a cooked or boiled dressing thickened with egg and mustard, or a plain oil-and-vinegar; no cross-reference is given here. A sharp vinaigrette at about three parts oil to one part vinegar arguably suits this better than anything creamy, since the vegetables are already wet.
- Salt timingSalt the tomato flesh only just before dressing and serving. Salting early draws out more liquid and defeats the seeding.
- ServingPresumably served cool, and best assembled shortly before the table. Heavily chilled tomatoes lose aroma, so they are better barely below room temperature than straight from the refrigerator.
Tomato salads appear in American cookbooks of the 1870s and 80s, by which time the tomato was an ordinary summer vegetable; the familiar story of a long reputation as poisonous or merely medicinal is often overstated, as tomatoes were widely eaten in the United States well before this date. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, published in Minneapolis in 1877 and drawn from contributed Ohio and Midwestern kitchens, treats it as unremarkable and worth only a sentence. The insistence on discarding skin, juice and seeds is consistent with period taste, which often found tomato skins coarse and the seeds objectionable; celery, then a fashionable and comparatively expensive stalk vegetable often served on its own in a glass, was a common partner.