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Iced Tomatoes
Scald and peel small, smooth tomatoes, place them on ice until very cold. Serve whole on cracked ice and with a bowl of French dressing.
A cold-course salad rather than a cooked dish; the work is all in the peeling and the chilling.
- The hinge: peel cleanly, chill hardDrop the tomatoes into boiling water for 15-30 seconds, until the skin splits, then straight into ice water. The skins slip off in one piece and the flesh stays firm. Much longer and the outer layer begins to soften.
- Choose the right tomatoSmall, smooth and firm means something in the range of a large cherry, cocktail or small Campari tomato. A dead-ripe heirloom will collapse once peeled and will not sit up on the ice.
- "Place them on ice"In a period kitchen this would have meant the icebox, or the ice itself. Two hours in the refrigerator does the same, though tomatoes lose aroma when held much below about 50-55F, so do not chill them for days.
- Cracked ice as a serving bedIce wrapped in a towel and struck with a rolling pin gives the right texture. Serve on a shallow chilled dish and expect meltwater, so keep the dressing in its own bowl rather than pooling it under the fruit.
- French dressing, 1900 senseNot the sweet orange bottled American dressing but a plain vinaigrette: roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, salt, pepper, whisked or shaken to emulsify. Some period recipes add a pinch of paprika or a little onion juice.
- Yield and place in the mealAllow two to three small tomatoes per person. This belongs as a first course or an accompaniment to cold meat, and it wants salt at the table since none is added to the tomatoes themselves.
Iced tomatoes belong to the era when domestic ice was newly reliable and cookbooks liked to show it off: chilled fruit, frappé soups and salads served on cracked ice all signalled a well-run household with an icebox and a regular delivery. Tomatoes themselves, long grown as ornamentals and eyed with suspicion, had won broad acceptance in American kitchens by the 1830s and 1840s, and by the 1890s they appear constantly in vegetable manuals raw, stewed, stuffed and scalloped. Serving them whole and cold with a bowl of dressing alongside is the plainest possible treatment, in keeping with a growing conviction that uncooked vegetables had a place at the table rather than being boiled into submission.