Home › Salads and Salad Dressings › Tomato-and-Peanut Salad
Tomato-and-Peanut Salad
Prepare the tomatoes as directed above. Blanch 1 pint of roasted peanut meats by pouring boiling water over them. Skin, and when cold pound in a mortar and mix with mayonnaise. Fill the tomatoes with this and serve on lettuce.
A stuffed-tomato salad from the era when the hollowed raw tomato was the standard salad case. The recipe assumes you have already read the entry above it, so the tomato preparation has to be supplied from general practice.
- Preparing the tomatoesA method commonly given in books of this period: scald the tomatoes briefly to loosen the skins, peel, slice off the stem end, scoop out the seeds and watery pulp, salt lightly, and invert on a rack to drain before chilling. Draining is what keeps the filling from turning to soup.
- A pint of peanutsMeasured by volume, not weight. A pint of shelled roasted peanuts is roughly 10 to 12 oz, which yields a generous quantity of paste, enough for eight to ten medium tomatoes.
- Blanching roasted nutsPouring boiling water over already-roasted peanuts loosens the papery red skins so they slip off between the fingers. Drain and dry them well before pounding, or the paste will be slack.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does in seconds what the mortar did in ten minutes, but pulse rather than run it. Peanuts pass quickly from coarse meal to oily peanut butter, and the salad wants the texture of chopped nuts bound with dressing, not a smooth spread.
- Proportion of mayonnaiseNone is specified. Add it a spoonful at a time until the mixture just holds together, generally about a third of a cup to two cups of pounded nuts. Season with salt; the ground peanuts absorb a surprising amount.
- Mayonnaise and raw eggIf you make the dressing from scratch it will contain uncooked egg. Use pasteurized eggs, or good bottled mayonnaise, and keep the filled tomatoes cold until they go to the table.
- ServingOne tomato per person on a bed of lettuce as a first course or luncheon salad. Fill no more than an hour ahead; the nut paste stiffens and the tomato weeps if it stands.