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Stuffed Tomato Salad
Remove the skin from eight tomatoes; scoop out the inside. Chill shells. Drain pulp; add equal quantity of celery, shrimps and cucumber, mixed with mayonnaise dressing. Refill shells; serve on cress, and garnish with mayonnaise.
A stuffed salad of the sort that filled the salad course in the early 1900s. Almost all the work is in the preparation of the shells, and the whole thing depends on getting the water out.
- Peeling the tomatoesScore an X in the base and dip the tomatoes in boiling water for 15-30 seconds, then into ice water; the skins slip off. Use firm, ripe round tomatoes about 3 inches across so the shells hold their shape.
- Salt and drain the shellsThe original says only to chill them. Salting the hollowed shells lightly and inverting them on a rack for 20-30 minutes draws out the water that would otherwise thin the mayonnaise into soup.
- Drain the pulp properlyTomato pulp is mostly liquid. Chop it, then drain in a sieve for several minutes and press gently; the seeds and jelly can go. What remains should be roughly a third of what you scooped out.
- "Equal quantity" of eachRead it as equal volumes of drained pulp, diced celery, shrimp and peeled seeded cucumber. For eight tomatoes that comes to about a cup of each; a cup of small cooked shrimp weighs roughly 5 oz.
- ShrimpsIn 1907 this meant small cooked shrimp, canned or bought ready-boiled. Use cooked, peeled cold-water shrimp, or poach raw ones for two to three minutes until just opaque and chill them; overcooked shrimp turn to rubber in a cold salad.
- CucumberPeel, seed and dice, then salt and drain like the shells. Modern cucumbers are wetter than they look and will slacken the dressing within the hour.
- CressIn recipes of this period 'cress' usually meant watercress, though garden cress went by the same name. Any peppery green works, but the point is a bed sturdy enough to keep the tomato upright.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise was made with raw yolks. Commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurised egg and behaves the same here; if you make your own, use pasteurised eggs and keep the salad refrigerated.
- Timing and yieldServes eight as a first course. Dress and fill no more than half an hour before serving, or the tomatoes weep and the shells collapse.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer; like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the period it paired a full general cookery text with chapters on the sponsor's product. Its salad section belongs squarely to the Anglo-American salad vogue of the 1900s, when the separate salad course became a fixture of middle-class dinners and cookbooks filled with elaborately constructed cold dishes: cases cut from tomatoes, cucumbers, apples and green peppers, filled with chopped things bound in mayonnaise and set on a leaf. Mayonnaise was already well established in American cookbooks by this date, though commercial jarred versions were only beginning to appear; the ability to make it well was taken as a mark of a competent cook, which is why recipes of this period call for it so freely and explain it so seldom. The shrimp may well have come from a can, canned shrimp being widely available and cheap enough to make a dish like this an economical way to look expensive.