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Yellow Tomato Salad
Peel the tomatoes, cut them in halves and marinate in French dressing on ice for an hour. Mix a cupful of diced celery, with half a cupful of chopped cooked chestnuts and a quarter cupful of mayonnaise. Cover a platter with watercress, arrange the tomato halves on this and put a mound of the celery and chestnut mixture on the tomatoes. Pour the French dressing that the tomatoes were in over the cress and serve.
A composed salad from the era when a salad meant something arranged on a platter rather than tossed in a bowl. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the components — French dressing and cooked chestnuts — meant something more specific in 1930s kitchens than they do now.
- French dressingIn American cookbooks of this period French dressing is a plain vinaigrette: roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt, pepper, whisked or shaken fresh. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today, which would ruin the dish.
- Yellow tomatoesChoose firm, meaty yellow slicers or large yellow plum types. Yellow varieties are usually described as milder and less acid than red, though the measured difference in acidity is small; very juicy ones will collapse and water down the platter.
- PeelingScore an X in the base, dip in boiling water for 15 to 30 seconds, then into ice water. The skins slip off. Do this before the tomatoes go into the dressing, not after.
- "On ice for an hour"An hour in the refrigerator. If the tomatoes are ripe, salt the cut halves lightly and drain them cut-side down for ten minutes first, or the marinade will be mostly tomato juice by the end.
- Cooked chestnutsHalf a cup chopped is roughly 2½ to 3 oz of peeled nuts, or about 4 oz in the shell. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts work directly; raw ones need scoring, roasting or boiling for 15 to 20 minutes, and peeling while hot. Water chestnuts are a different thing entirely and are not a substitute.
- MayonnaiseA quarter cup of commercial mayonnaise is fine; recipes of this period often assumed homemade mayonnaise made with uncooked yolk, and nothing in this salad is cooked afterwards. Fold it in just before assembling so the celery stays crisp.
- WatercressWash well and dry thoroughly; wet cress and oil dressing do not combine. Peppery arugula or young mustard greens stand in acceptably, though cress has the cleaner bite the dish is built around.
- Yield and timingServes four as a first course, using two tomatoes. Assemble at the last minute — the dressing poured over the cress wilts it within a few minutes of reaching the table.
Salads like this one belong to the American "salad course" tradition that flourished between the 1890s and the Second World War, when a salad was often expected to be built and looked at: a base of greens, a container element, a mounded filling, a dressing poured at the end. Chestnuts were a common autumn ingredient in the northeastern United States into the early 20th century, before chestnut blight destroyed the American chestnut and most cooking chestnuts began arriving imported from Italy. Yellow tomatoes, now a farmers' market item, were grown in home gardens and were sometimes said to be gentler on the stomach than red ones — a belief without much backing.