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Stuffed Tomato Salad
Mrs. F. J. Wagner.
Peel tomatoes, chill and remove seeds and pulp. Put one teaspoonful French dressing or mayonnaise in each and stand in ice box until ready to serve then fill with equal parts of finely chopped celery and nuts. Serve on lettuce with mayonnaise.
Lorna Vanston.
A straightforward composed salad that depends almost entirely on the quality of the tomatoes and on keeping everything cold. A few points on technique and proportion.
- PeelingThe book assumes you know to blanch: score the blossom end, drop into boiling water 15-30 seconds, then into ice water and the skin slips off. Do not leave them in the boiling water long enough to cook the flesh soft.
- Hollowing outCut a lid from the stem end and scoop with a small spoon or melon baller, leaving a wall thick enough to stand up. Salt the inside lightly and invert on a rack for 20 minutes to drain, or the dressing will thin into tomato water.
- French dressingIn an American church cookbook of this period this means a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt, pepper and often a little sugar or paprika. It is not a sweet orange bottled dressing.
- Chilling time"Stand in ice box until ready to serve" gives no fixed period; a home icebox typically ran somewhere around 45-50F, so the shells wanted a decent spell in it. A modern refrigerator does the same job faster; an hour is plenty.
- The nutsAdd them only at the moment of filling, as the recipe directs. Walnuts or pecans soften and go dull once they sit in mayonnaise, and the whole point of the dish is the contrast of crisp celery and nut against soft tomato.
- QuantityFigure about a quarter cup of the celery-and-nut mixture per medium tomato, so roughly one cup of each will fill eight. One tomato per person as a salad course.
- ServingChoose tomatoes with flat bottoms or shave a thin slice off the base so they sit upright on the lettuce leaf. The recipe does not say where the final mayonnaise goes; a spoonful on top is the usual reading.
Stuffed tomatoes on lettuce were a fixture of American salad cookery from the 1890s through the 1930s, the era when the salad course moved from a plain dressed green to something built and presented on the plate. Celery, nuts and mayonnaise were a common filling combination, cheap and reliably crisp, and the same combination turns up in apple, pear and cabbage salads of the period. The double attribution, with one name at the head and another at the foot, is often seen in community cookbooks, where recipes circulated among congregations and could be submitted by someone other than their originator.