Home › Cookery › To Dress Raw Tomatoes
To Dress Raw Tomatoes
Slice a plateful large fresh tomatoes. Pour over them a dressing made of the yolk of one egg and olive oil, creamed smoothly together; salt and pepper to the taste; one teaspoonful prepared mustard, a little vinegar. If you like, you may add sugar.--Mrs. R. L. O.
To dress Raw Tomatoes.
Peel and cut in thick slices six large ripe tomatoes which have been kept on ice. Put a layer into a salad bowl, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and powdered sugar. Put in another layer, and so on, till all the tomatoes are disposed of. Pour over the top a teacup of weak vinegar. Cover the top with ice, and set in the refrigerator ten minutes before serving.--Mrs. S. T.
Two contributed methods for the same dish: an improvised mayonnaise in the first, and a sugared, vinegar-doused iced salad in the second. Both are quick, but both leave quantities to the cook's judgment.
- The oil is unmeasuredOne egg yolk will emulsify roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of olive oil, so that is the working range for the first dressing. Add the oil in a thin stream while whisking; dumping it in at once will break the emulsion.
- Raw yolkThe first dressing is an uncooked mayonnaise and is never heated. Use pasteurized eggs, or shell eggs you trust, and keep the dressing refrigerated and eat it the same day.
- Prepared mustardIn this period "prepared mustard" meant a ready-mixed mustard paste rather than the sweet American yellow mustard of the twentieth century. A plain, sharp mustard such as Dijon is a reasonable stand-in.
- A teacupPeriod teacup measures varied, and are usually reckoned at somewhere between half a cup and three-quarters of a cup. "Weak vinegar" means a diluted or low-strength vinegar, so cut it with water to taste; undiluted cider or white wine vinegar in that quantity will overwhelm six tomatoes.
- Powdered sugarHere this means finely ground sugar, not the modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. Superfine or ordinary granulated sugar works, about a teaspoon total across the layers.
- Ice on topLoose ice laid on the tomatoes will melt into the dressing and dilute it. A bowl of tomatoes chilled 30 minutes in the refrigerator, dressed just before serving, gives the intended cold without the water.
- PeelingThe second recipe assumes peeled tomatoes. Cut a shallow X in the skin, dip 15 to 20 seconds in boiling water, then into cold water and the skin slips off; chill again before slicing.
- YieldSix large tomatoes serve six as a side salad. The mayonnaise from one yolk is enough for two or three plates of sliced tomatoes.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, is credited recipe by recipe to initials like Mrs. R. L. O. and Mrs. S. T., siding with households rather than one author's ideal. That two different women sent in the same dish says something about how new it still felt: raw tomatoes are often said to have been regarded with suspicion in America into the nineteenth century, though the story is much repeated and tomatoes were widely eaten by mid-century. By the 1870s the sliced tomato salad had arrived, but the seasoning still hedges toward the sweet-and-sour treatment older cooks gave fruit, with sugar and vinegar doing work that later cooks would give to oil alone. The insistence on ice is a mark of the period too: domestic iceboxes, stocked from commercial ice deliveries, were becoming common in Southern towns, and a cook who could serve a dish genuinely cold was showing it off.