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Lettuce-and-Tomato Salad
Pick the lettuce apart and place it in your salad bowl. Pare your tomatoes and cut them into eighths; then lay on the bed of lettuce leaves and pour French dressing over them.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already know how to make French dressing and how to peel a tomato. Both are worth a word.
- French dressing, as meant hereIn American books of this period French dressing is simply oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked or shaken together; the proportions vary from book to book, commonly somewhere between two and three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- Paring the tomatoesPeeling with a knife wastes flesh. Score an X in the base, drop the tomatoes into boiling water for 15-30 seconds, then into cold water; the skins slip off. Very ripe summer tomatoes will often peel with a serrated peeler alone.
- Pick apart, do not cutTearing lettuce by hand rather than slicing it is the usual advice, on the grounds that it bruises the leaf less than a blade does, though the difference is easily overstated. Wash the leaves well and dry them thoroughly - dressing slides off wet leaves and pools at the bottom of the bowl.
- Dress at the tableSalt in the dressing draws water from both lettuce and tomato within minutes. Pour the dressing on immediately before serving, not while the salad waits.
- EighthsFor a medium tomato, eighths give wedges of a good size; a large beefsteak is better in twelfths, or the pieces overwhelm the leaves.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities or yield. As a rough guide, one head of lettuce and two or three tomatoes, with about half a cup of dressing, would serve four as a side salad.
Raw tomato salad was not a new idea for American households by the turn of the twentieth century — sliced raw tomatoes dressed with oil and vinegar appear in American cookbooks well before this — though tomatoes were long more often met stewed or as ketchup. What is clear is that the salad course grew markedly more fashionable in the closing decades of the century, a vogue usually credited to French-influenced restaurant cooking. The instruction to pare the tomatoes reflects a period preference for skinless fruit at table, and the brevity of the entry suggests the compiler expected readers to know French dressing already; books of this kind commonly give it as its own recipe elsewhere.