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Tomatoes Stuffed with Chicken Salad
Scald and drop into cold water 6 firm, smooth, round tomatoes; peel them and cut a slice from the blossom end. Take out the seeds and fill with chicken salad; put 1 spoonful of whipped cream on the top of each, replace the slice cut from the end, laying it lightly on the top. Set each tomato in a little nest of crisp lettuce leaves, and put on the ice to chill. Serve very cold, and pass a mayonnaise dressing with it.
A cold composed salad from the era when the tomato was still treated as a showpiece. Nothing here is cooked, so the whole dish depends on firm fruit and thorough chilling.
- Scald and peelThirty to sixty seconds in boiling water, then straight into ice water; the skin will slip off in sheets. Any longer and the outer flesh softens and the shell will collapse once hollowed.
- Blossom endThe end opposite the stem scar. Cutting there gives a flatter lid and leaves the tougher stem end as the base, so the tomato stands upright.
- HollowingScoop the seeds and pulp with a teaspoon and leave the walls intact. Salt the cavities lightly and invert them on a rack for 15 minutes to drain, or the salad will sit in tomato water.
- The chicken saladThe recipe does not specify it, but a chicken salad of the period would be cooked chicken cut small and bound with mayonnaise, often with celery. Roughly 2 cups will fill six tomatoes; keep the dice small so the filling packs without splitting the shell.
- Whipped cream on saladUnsweetened cream whipped to soft peaks appears as a garnish on cold salads in this period and reads as a lighter mayonnaise. The recipe adds it before chilling; note that it will slacken if it stands long.
- "Put on the ice"The icebox, meaning the refrigerator. An hour is enough; the filling holds no more than a few hours before it slackens.
- Mayonnaise passed separatelyThe recipe simply directs that a mayonnaise dressing be handed at table alongside the tomatoes. Any good mayonnaise serves.
- YieldSix stuffed tomatoes, one apiece as a luncheon course or first course.