Home › Vegetables › Tomatoes Stuffed with Celery
Tomatoes Stuffed with Celery
Scald and peel smooth, round tomatoes, cut the slices off the stem end and scrape out the seeds. Place the tomatoes on ice to get very cold. Cut in small pieces the white part of celery, moisten it with French dressing. Fill the tomatoes, place each tomato on a crisp lettuce leaf and serve as a salad.
A raw salad that depends entirely on temperature and timing: cold tomatoes, crisp celery, and dressing added at the last possible moment.
- French dressing, 1900s senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. It means a plain vinaigrette: oil and vinegar in something like a two-to-one or three-to-one proportion, seasoned with salt and pepper, though period recipes often add paprika or mustard.
- The white part of celeryThe pale inner ribs of the heart, the tender portion; the coarser outer stalks were often put to other uses such as soup. Modern supermarket celery is generally milder, but the heart is still the right choice for its crispness.
- Scalding and peelingScore a shallow cross in the blossom end, hold the tomato in boiling water for 15 to 30 seconds, then drop it into ice water. The skin slips off in sheets. Longer than half a minute and the flesh under the skin turns soft and the shell will slump.
- Salt and drain the shellsThe recipe does not say so, but after scraping out the seeds it pays to salt the insides lightly and invert them on a rack for ten minutes. Otherwise the tomato weeps into the celery and thins the dressing.
- Dress at the last momentCelery moistened with vinaigrette and left to sit goes limp and watery. Cut and chill the celery separately, then toss with dressing and fill immediately before serving.
- "On ice"The refrigerator, an hour or so. Very cold tomatoes hold their shape when hollowed and cut cleanly at the table; room-temperature ones collapse under a fork.
- YieldOne tomato per person as a first course or side salad. A medium tomato holds about a third of a cup of diced celery, so figure two to three inner ribs for four servings.
Stuffed-tomato salads were everywhere in American cookery between the 1890s and the 1920s, when the composed salad on a lettuce leaf became the mark of a properly served luncheon. Celery is the other period marker: it was a prestige vegetable in the late nineteenth century, expensive to grow and blanched to whiten the hearts, and it was set out at table in tall cut-glass celery vases precisely so guests would notice it. Pairing the two raw, dressed only with oil and vinegar, was the sort of dish that signalled a cook who understood that not everything needed to be cooked, sauced, or moulded in aspic.