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Tomato and Mushroom Salad
Scoop out six tomatoes, leaving a shell, mix the pulp with an equal quantity of chopped olives and chopped mushrooms, allow two tablespoons of French dressing to each tomato, refill tomato shells, garnish with mayonnaise dressing, and serve on lettuce or watercress.
A stuffed-tomato salad of the sort that filled the cold course at luncheon tables around 1900. It assembles in twenty minutes, but a few of its terms have shifted meaning.
- French dressingIn this period the phrase means a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing shaken together with salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar. It does not mean the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- Mayonnaise dressingWritten mayonnaise here, and homemade mayonnaise of the time used raw yolks. If you make your own and are serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs, or simply use a good jarred mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice for piping.
- The mushroomsThe recipe says only 'chopped mushrooms'; canned or previously cooked mushrooms were commonly used in cold salads of the period, and either would suit here. Raw cultivated white or cremini mushrooms are perfectly edible but spongy and a little damp; slicing them thin and sauteing briefly in butter, then cooling, gives a far better texture and flavor.
- Drain the pulpThis is the hinge. Scooped tomato pulp is mostly water, and if it goes into the shells wet the dressing pools and the salad collapses. Chop the pulp, salt it lightly, let it drain in a sieve for fifteen minutes, then mix with the olives and mushrooms.
- Salt the shells tooSprinkle the hollowed tomatoes with salt and invert them on a rack for ten minutes before filling. It seasons them and draws out the liquid that would otherwise flood the plate.
- The olivesEither brine-cured green olives or ripe black olives suit this; the recipe specifies only 'chopped olives'. Rinse and chop them, and taste before you add more salt anywhere else.
- Dressing quantityTwo tablespoons of French dressing per tomato is generous for the filling alone. Toss the filling with about half that and reserve the rest to dress the lettuce or watercress underneath.
- Yield and timingSix tomatoes serve six as a first course or three as a light lunch. Chill the filled tomatoes no more than an hour before serving; longer and the shells go slack.
Stuffed raw tomatoes were a fixture of American luncheon and supper menus from the 1890s onward, by which time the tomato had become a standard salad vegetable. The salad chapters of household manuals from this period are full of hollowed tomatoes filled with chopped chicken, shrimp, cucumber, celery or, as here, olives and mushrooms, often set on a leaf of lettuce and finished with a spoonful of mayonnaise. Canned mushrooms and olives both reached the pantry through the grocery trade rather than the garden, and that combination of homegrown tomato and shelf-stable delicacy is characteristic of the era's cooking.