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Tomatoes
In the season of fresh tomatoes, the simplest way of serving them is to slice and use them as a salad or side dish, or with sugar and cream as a dessert. Served in this way some people consider them a close rival to strawberries, the sugar and cream seeming to combine with them to bring out a flavor similar to that delectable berry.
To prepare them to be served raw, select smooth tomatoes of uniform size, put them in a wire basket, colander, or coarse strainer, plunge them in boiling water, let them stand a few minutes, then plunge them into cold water. They can almost immediately be handled easily, and the skins will peel off very readily. Put them on or near the ice to get very cold, and when ready to serve slice and serve with a French or mayonnaise dressing or with sugar as liked. The small round peach or egg tomatoes are very pretty served whole, in nests of lettuce or cress.
The tomato contains so much acid that it needs very little vinegar, and the persistent use of salt, pepper, and vinegar as a dressing is said to induce irritation of the mouth and the coating of the stomach and digestive organs.
This is a method rather than a formula: blanch, peel, chill, dress. The instructions still work, though a couple of the timings and claims need adjusting.
- The blanching window"Let them stand a few minutes" in boiling water is far too long and will cook the outer flesh to mush. Ten to thirty seconds is enough once the skins split, then straight into ice water.
- Score them firstA shallow X cut in the blossom end before blanching makes the skin lift away in four clean flaps. The original assumes it will simply slip off, which it does only on fully ripe fruit.
- "On or near the ice"This means the icebox, which ran cooler than the room but well above modern refrigeration and varied considerably. An hour in the refrigerator is plenty; longer than a day and the texture turns mealy and the aroma flattens, which is why ripe tomatoes are now often served at room temperature and chilled only briefly before slicing.
- Peach and egg tomatoesSmall round and small oval sorts respectively; both were named varieties of the period. Modern cherry, cocktail or plum tomatoes are the nearest available equivalents, and any of them work for the whole-fruit presentation in lettuce.
- Sugar and creamNot a mistake in the text. Sliced ripe tomatoes with a spoonful of sugar and cold cream were a genuine summer dessert; sweet, low-acid varieties suit it best.
- The dressing warningThe claim that salt, pepper and vinegar irritate the stomach lining is period medical opinion, not fact. The practical half of the advice holds: a ripe tomato carries its own acid, so use a dressing weighted toward oil, about four parts oil to one of vinegar.
- QuantityAllow one medium tomato per person as a side salad, or two if it is the main part of the course.
Nineteenth-century American cooks were still working through what a tomato was for. Established in American gardens by the middle decades of the century but earlier regarded with some suspicion, it arrived at the table in an unsettled category, and household books of this period file it variously as a vegetable, a salad, a sauce base and, as here, a dessert. Sliced tomatoes with sugar and cream were familiar enough by the late 1800s to be set down without explanation, as they are here, and the comparison to strawberries appears in other cookery writing of the period. The digestive warning at the end reflects a broader current in American domestic advice of the era, in which vinegar, pepper and "stimulating" condiments were held responsible for a range of internal complaints. The blanch-and-shock peeling technique described here, meanwhile, has not changed.