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Tomato and Celery Salad
Peel six good-sized tomatoes. Cut off the stem end and carefully take out the seeds without breaking the tomato. Cut the white part of two stalks of celery into small pieces. Mix two tablespoonfuls of chopped parsley, with the rule for Rorer dressing add it to the celery. Fill this into the tomatoes, stand them on a bed of crisp lettuce leaves and serve at once.
Water-cress may be substituted for celery.
A simple stuffed-tomato salad that depends almost entirely on the tomatoes being ripe, cold and well drained. The only real difficulty is the cross-reference to a dressing given elsewhere in the book.
- Drain the shellsAfter coring and seeding, salt the hollowed tomatoes lightly and stand them upside down on a rack for 15-20 minutes. Otherwise they release water into the filling and the salad slumps within minutes of being dressed, which is why the original insists on serving at once.
- PeelingDip the tomatoes in boiling water for 15-20 seconds, then into cold water, and the skins slip off. Scalding was the usual period method for skinning tomatoes; a serrated peeler works on very firm fruit but tears ripe ones.
- "Rorer dressing"This is a cross-reference to a dressing given elsewhere, so the page alone does not tell you what goes in. Mrs. Rorer's salad dressings range from a plain oil-and-vinegar French dressing to a thickened cooked dressing bound with egg and cream; a basic vinaigrette of three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and pepper will serve.
- "Two stalks of celery"Nineteenth-century usage was inconsistent: a "stalk" could mean a whole head as well as a single rib, and "the white part" means the pale inner heart. Judge by volume: roughly a cup of finely diced celery will fill six tomatoes.
- Watercress substitutionIf you use watercress in place of celery, chop it coarsely and dress it only at the moment of filling. It wilts far faster than diced celery and gives a peppery rather than crisp result.
- Yield and servingSix tomatoes, one each, as a first course or a light lunch salad. Chill the shells and the filling separately and assemble at the table if you can.
This comes from Sarah Tyson Rorer, and the casual instruction to "add the rule for Rorer dressing" is a reminder of how her books worked: she was principal of the Philadelphia Cooking School, and her recipes cross-referenced one another by name. The dish itself belongs to a moment when the tomato was appearing raw and in quantity in American kitchens — the older suspicion of it as unwholesome is often said to have faded around this time, though the story is a messier one — and when the stuffed or "cup" salad served on a lettuce leaf was becoming the standard genteel presentation. Celery, meanwhile, was a prestige vegetable in this period, blanched and sold in specialised glass vases for the table, which explains the insistence on the pale inner heart rather than the green outer ribs.