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Cucumber Salad
Select medium-sized tomatoes, peel them and chill. Cut a piece from the top, hollow out the tomato and fill the space with diced cucumber that has been marinated in French dressing.
Garnish each tomato with a rosette of green mayonnaise, tinted green with coloring paste.
Serve on lettuce leaves.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one: the "cucumber salad" is the filling, and the tomato is the cup. Nearly everything here is about drainage and chilling.
- Salt the cucumber firstDiced cucumber sheds a great deal of water once dressed, and a watery filling will slump out of the tomato. Toss the dice with a little salt, let stand 20 minutes, drain and pat dry, then marinate in the dressing for no more than half an hour.
- Peeling the tomatoesThe original assumes you can strip a ripe summer tomato with a knife. For firmer supermarket fruit, dip 10-15 seconds in boiling water, then straight into ice water, and the skin slips off. Chill the peeled tomatoes at least an hour so they hold their shape.
- Drain the shellsAfter hollowing, salt the insides lightly and invert the tomatoes on a rack or paper towel for 15 minutes. This is the step that keeps the finished plate from flooding.
- French dressing, 1930s senseFrench dressing, older sense -- Not a sweet orange bottled dressing but a plain vinaigrette: oil and vinegar in roughly two-to-four parts oil to one of vinegar, salt, pepper, sometimes a little mustard or paprika. Make it thin, since it doubles as the marinade.
- Green mayonnaiseThe classic version, sauce verte, is tinted by pureed blanched greens and herbs -- spinach or watercress with parsley, tarragon and chervil -- squeezed dry and beaten into mayonnaise; it tastes of something. Coloring paste, as called for here, was the quicker substitute and adds nothing but color.
- Piping the rosetteMayonnaise must be quite stiff to hold a rosette, and homemade mayonnaise loosens as it warms. Use a small star tip, pipe just before serving, and keep the plates cold.
- Raw eggHomemade mayonnaise here is uncooked and served cold. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised; commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurized egg as standard.
- YieldOne tomato per person as a first course or luncheon salad; two if it is the whole of a light meal. Assemble no more than half an hour ahead.
This is warm-weather cookery of a familiar American school: the "cool" summer menu of the interwar decades, meant to spare both the cook and the icebox. The stuffed tomato was one of its workhorses, a way to serve something composed and decorative with no heat beyond a kettle for loosening skins. The green mayonnaise points back to French sauce verte, an herb-tinted mayonnaise long served with cold fish, though by this period coloring paste of the sort sold for cake icing could produce the effect without the herbs. The rosette of mayonnaise suggests that the aesthetics of the professional garde-manger had reached home entertaining, where a salad was expected to be looked at as well as eaten.