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Cucumber-and-Tomato Salad
Place sliced crisp cucumbers irregularly on a leaf of lettuce. On these lay slices of ripe red tomatoes, and serve with either French or mayonnaise dressing. The delicate green of the cucumber, combined with the lettuce of another shade, and the red tomato, has a pretty effect. If yellow tomatoes are obtainable, they will add a novelty to the effect.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and it depends almost entirely on the condition of the vegetables. Everything hinges on the cucumbers being genuinely crisp and the tomatoes fully ripe.
- Crisp cucumbersNineteenth-century cucumbers were generally thicker-skinned field varieties, and period sources often direct peeling and either soaking in cold water or salting and draining to firm them and draw off water. With thin-skinned English or Persian cucumbers, skip the peeling and simply slice them cold; a brief soak in ice water restores snap to any that have gone limp.
- Do not dress in advanceSalt and acid pull juice from both cucumber and tomato within minutes, leaving a watery pool under the lettuce. Assemble the plates and dress them at the table.
- Salt the tomatoes, not the saladThe instruction gives no seasoning at all. A light sprinkle of salt on the tomato slices alone, a minute before dressing, brings out flavour without flooding the plate.
- French dressingIn this period that means a simple vinaigrette shaken to order, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and pepper, not a sweet orange-coloured bottled dressing.
- Yellow tomatoesOnce a genuine novelty and now easy to find as heirloom or cherry varieties. They are often described as milder-tasting than red types, though their measured acidity is not reliably lower, so the difference is as much flavour balance as chemistry.
- The lettuce leafIt is a cup to hold the slices, so a cohesive leaf matters more than the variety: butterhead, Boston or the inner leaves of romaine all work. Iceberg shreds and collapses.
- YieldOne leaf per plate as written, which makes an individual first-course salad. Figure half a cucumber and one medium tomato per person.
The tomato only became widely trusted as a raw salad vegetable in the second half of the nineteenth century, and as refrigerated rail transport spread and commercial mayonnaise became widely available in the early twentieth century, the composed salad established itself as a course in its own right rather than a relish or a side. Entries of this kind are short by design: less instruction than an idea for a hostess, assuming the cook already knows how to mix a French dressing and simply needs to be told what to put where. The note on colour here is plainly the point of the entry.