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Tomato and Nut Salad
Remove the skin from eight tomatoes; scoop out the inside; mix the drained pulp with equal amount of chopped walnuts and one fourth cup chopped green peppers. Add mayonnaise dressing or cream dressing. Refill tomato shells; serve in lettuce nests, and garnish with mayonnaise.
A straightforward stuffed-tomato salad of the sort that filled the salad chapter of every American cookbook between about 1890 and 1930. The only real technique is getting the shells to hold their shape.
- PeelingThe book assumes you know to dip the tomatoes in boiling water for 15-20 seconds and slip the skins off, then chill. Blanching warms the flesh, so refrigerate the peeled tomatoes for at least half an hour before hollowing or the shells will slump.
- Drain the pulp seriouslyThis is the hinge. Scooped tomato interior is mostly water and seed jelly; if you fold it into the nuts wet, the filling turns to soup and the shells collapse. Chop it, salt it lightly, and let it drain in a sieve for 20-30 minutes, pressing gently.
- Salt the shells tooNot in the original, but worth doing: sprinkle the hollowed shells with salt and invert them on a rack for 15 minutes to shed liquid before filling.
- "Equal amount" of walnutsRead as equal to the drained pulp by volume, not to the whole tomatoes. Eight medium tomatoes will yield roughly a cup or more of drained pulp, so measure the walnuts against whatever the pulp comes to. Toasting them briefly is worth doing, though the recipe does not call for it.
- Green peppersThis means a green (unripe) bell pepper. A quarter cup is enough for eight tomatoes; the pepper is there for bite, not bulk.
- Cream dressingIn cookbooks of this period a "cream dressing" is usually either a cooked dressing thickened with egg and cream and sharpened with vinegar, or a plain cream-and-vinegar dressing; the recipe does not specify. Either works here, but mayonnaise holds the filling together better.
- Lettuce nestsCupped leaves from the heart of an iceberg or butter lettuce, arranged as a bowl on each plate. Chill the leaves so they stay rigid under the tomato.
- YieldEight servings as a first course or luncheon salad, one tomato each. Best assembled within an hour of serving; the filling weeps if it stands overnight.
Stuffed tomato salads were a fixture of the American "dainty luncheon" era, when a salad course was expected to arrive looking constructed rather than tossed, and lettuce leaves were used as edible ramekins for anything that could be mounded. Walnuts and celery or peppers bound with mayonnaise belong to the same family of ideas as Waldorf salad, which had emerged from New York hotel cooking in the 1890s as a dish of apples, celery and mayonnaise, with walnuts a later addition. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the period it surrounded its promotional confectionery chapters with a complete general cookbook so the volume would earn a place on the kitchen shelf. Cold salads of this kind also depended on something new to the middle-class household: reliable ice, and later mechanical refrigeration, without which a dish assembled in advance and served chilled was not practical.