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Roquefort Salad
Fill cold and peeled tomatoes with grated Roquefort cheese and serve on lettuce leaves with French dressing. Cheese salads can be varied by adding chopped onion, olives, peppers, parsley, chives, pimientos or capers.
A two-line assembly recipe that assumes a cook who already knows how to hollow a tomato and shake a dressing. The only real decisions are the tomato and the cheese.
- Hollowing the tomatoesPeel by dipping in boiling water for 15-20 seconds, then cut off the stem end and scoop out the seeds and pulp with a teaspoon. Salt the cavities lightly and invert on a rack for 15 minutes so they drain, or the dressing pools into water.
- Grated RoquefortRoquefort is a soft blue sheep's-milk cheese and will not really grate on a box grater. Crumble it with a fork instead, or freeze it for 20 minutes first.
- Cheese quantityFigure roughly 1 oz (about 2 tablespoons crumbled) per medium tomato. Roquefort is aggressively salty, so go light and skip salting the dressing.
- French dressing of the periodIn an American book of this period this means a simple vinaigrette, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today: about 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar with salt and pepper, beaten or shaken until cloudy.
- The additionsThe listed extras -- onion, olives, peppers, parsley, chives, pimientos, capers -- are all called for 'chopped'; the text does not say where they go, but working them fine into the cheese before filling is the easiest reading. Choose two at most; all seven would bury the Roquefort.
- Serve cold, dress lastChill the filled tomatoes and add dressing at the table. Oil sitting on lettuce for even ten minutes leaves it limp.
- YieldOne filled tomato per person as a first course or lunch salad; two if it is the whole meal.
Stuffed-tomato salads were a workhorse of the period -- cheap, cold, requiring no range time in summer, and presentable enough for a ladies' luncheon. Roquefort is made from sheep's milk in the caves at Roquefort-sur-Soulzon in southern France. The pairing of blue cheese with a tart oil-and-vinegar dressing is the same logic behind the blue cheese dressings that became an American restaurant staple later in the century; the note that "cheese salads can be varied" is characteristic of the period's cookbook style, where a single line of instruction was expected to stand in for a dozen variations the cook would work out herself.