Tomato Salad
6 tomatoes 1/2 cup of mayonnaise dressing. ½ cup of mayonnaise dressing The crisp part of one head of lettuce Peel the tomatoes without scalding, and put them on ice until they are very, very cold. Make the mayonnaise, and stand it on the ice until wanted. The lettuce may also be washed and dried. When ready to serve, cut the tomatoes in halves. Make twelve little nests with two or three salad leaves each, arrange uniformly on the dish, place half a tomato in each nest, put a tablespoonful of mayonnaise on each tomato, and serve immediately.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and almost entirely a matter of temperature and timing. The ingredient list is incomplete in the original — you need about six medium tomatoes to yield the twelve halves called for.
- The hinge: everything ice-coldThe dish has no dressing to hide behind, so the tomatoes and the mayonnaise must both come straight from the coldest part of the refrigerator and the plates should be chilled too. Assembled warm, it is limp within minutes, which is why the recipe ends with serve immediately.
- Peeling without scaldingDipping in boiling water cooks the outer flesh and softens it, which ruins the look of a cut half. Use a very ripe tomato and a sharp serrated peeler, or score the skin at the stem and work it off with a paring knife.
- QuantitiesSix medium tomatoes give twelve halves and twelve servings. The 1½ cups of mayonnaise is about 24 tablespoons, roughly twice the twelve tablespoonfuls actually spooned onto the tomatoes, so the original is generous. One large head of a crisp lettuce supplies enough inner leaves for twelve nests.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise is raw yolk, oil, vinegar or lemon and salt, beaten by hand and never heated. If you make it from scratch, use pasteurized eggs, and keep it cold and use it the same day rather than holding it over.
- SeasoningNo salt is mentioned for the tomatoes. Salt the cut faces lightly a minute or two before saucing them, and blot the moisture that beads up, or the mayonnaise will slide off.
- "Put them on ice"The original assumes an icebox, where food sat beside a block of ice; interior temperatures varied but were generally well above those of a modern refrigerator. A modern refrigerator is colder and does the job faster; an hour is ample.
- ServingThe recipe puts all twelve nests on one dish, arranged uniformly. Plated singly they work as a first course, and the halves can be cut side down and dressed at the table if the trip from kitchen is long.
Salads of this kind belong to the late-nineteenth-century vogue for cold suppers in summer, when a household cooking on a coal range had to light it for anything hot. Books of "hot weather dishes" answered that problem, and the spread of domestic iceboxes and commercial ice delivery made a genuinely cold dish possible in a city kitchen in July. Raw tomatoes were also newly fashionable: earlier American cookbooks more often stewed them at length or baked them, so serving them cold, peeled and barely touched marks a shift in taste. The composed presentation, uniform little nests set out on a single dish and sauced at the last moment, reflects the French-influenced service common in American cookery instruction of the 1880s and 1890s.