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Tomato Salad with Cheese Dressing
Cut 4 tomatoes in halves in such a way that they come apart in points. Arrange each half in a nest of Lettuce leaves. In the center of tomato pile Cream cheese forced through a coarse strainer. In center of cheese put a Few bits of green pepper finely chopped. Serve with cheese dressing.
A composed salad from a 1920s luncheon menu, built for looks as much as flavor. Two details carry it: the sawtooth cut and the texture of the cheese.
- Cutting in points"Come apart in points" means the Vandyke cut: push a small paring knife into the tomato at its equator at a 45-degree angle, all the way to the center, then reverse the angle and repeat around the whole circumference. The two halves separate with interlocking zigzag edges. Cutting straight across gives you a flat disc and loses the whole effect.
- Cream cheese in 1922Cream cheese in this period -- This means the soft, fresh, unripened cheese sold in bulk or in small foil-wrapped bricks, generally leaner and looser in body than the gum-stabilized block cheese of today. Let a modern brick soften fully at room temperature before pressing it, or it will crumble rather than thread.
- Forced through a coarse strainerA ricer or the coarse disc of a food mill does this best, producing short soft strands that pile up like a nest. Push directly over the tomato so the strands fall loose; scraping them off and spooning them on compacts them into a lump.
- The cheese dressingNo dressing recipe is given here, so one was presumably printed elsewhere. Cheese dressings of this sort were often a boiled or mayonnaise-type dressing thinned and beaten with grated or creamed cheese, sometimes with a little cream. Any tangy creamy dressing with cheese in it will serve; keep it loose enough to pour.
- Green pepperGreen bell pepper, chopped very fine, used here for color and a raw bite rather than heat. Chop it just before serving, as it weeps and dulls quickly.
- Tomatoes and chillingChoose firm, evenly round tomatoes of roughly equal size, unpeeled, and chill them thoroughly before cutting. A soft or overripe tomato will not hold the points. Salt the cut faces lightly and let them drain a minute before filling so the dressing does not slide off a wet surface.
- YieldFour tomatoes give eight halves, and the recipe fills each half separately, so eight servings, one half per plate.
This belongs to the American "salad as ornament" style of the early twentieth century, when luncheon and supper books for hostesses treated the salad course as the visual centerpiece of a light meal. The Vandyke or sawtooth cut, named for the pointed beards in Van Dyck's portraits, was a stock trick of the period and turns up applied to tomatoes, oranges, melons and hard-boiled eggs alike. Cream cheese, an American commercial product from the late nineteenth century onward, gave hostesses a soft white filling that piped, riced or molded easily.