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Salad of Cucumber and Tomato
Pare and slice two good-sized cucumbers and soak in cold water one hour. Drain on a soft towel. Pare and cut into thick slices two red, solid tomatoes. Cover the bottom of a flat dish with crisp lettuce leaves, arrange the cucum-
The text breaks off mid-sentence, but the method is clear enough to finish: cucumber and tomato slices arranged over lettuce, dressed at table. A few of the original's assumptions no longer hold.
- The hour-long soakCucumbers of the period were widely held to be cold, watery and indigestible, and cold water was thought to draw that quality out; older field varieties could also run bitter or coarse-seeded. Modern greenhouse and English cucumbers do not need it. If you are using a thick-skinned field cucumber, 20 minutes in ice water is enough to crisp the slices.
- Salting insteadFor a cucumber that will not weep into the dressing, salt the slices lightly, let them stand 20 minutes, then press dry in a towel. This does what the soak was reaching for and seasons the vegetable at the same time.
- "Red, solid tomatoes"Solid means firm and meaty rather than watery — a paste or plum type does this best. Slice thick, as directed, so they hold their shape against the cucumber.
- Draining on a soft towelNot decorative. Any water left on the slices will thin the dressing and make the lettuce collapse. Pat genuinely dry.
- The missing dressingThe page cuts off before it is named. A plain French dressing would be the usual choice for a salad of this kind: roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked and poured over just before serving.
- Assemble lateSalted tomato and cucumber both release liquid within minutes. Build the dish no more than a quarter hour before it goes to the table.
- YieldTwo cucumbers and two tomatoes serve four to six as a side salad.
Cucumber and tomato together may still have been a slightly modern pairing when this was written, though the fragment carries no date. The tomato spent much of the nineteenth century under suspicion in English-speaking kitchens — eaten stewed or cooked down into sauce far more often than raw — and only became ordinary on the salad plate late in the century, once reliable market supply and a taste for cold vegetable dishes caught up with it. Cucumbers had the opposite reputation: long popular but persistently accused of being cold, watery and hard to digest, which is why so many recipes of the era insist on paring, soaking and draining before they will let one near a plate. The composed salad on a bed of lettuce leaves, dressed at the last moment, is often associated with the period's enthusiasm for the salad course as a distinct and rather refined part of dinner.