Home › Seven Weeks' Menus › Tomato, Green Pepper Salad
Tomato, Green Pepper Salad
Cut fresh tomatoes in chunks, and green peppers in slivers, toss them together in salad bowl with French dressing. Let stand till very cold and serve from the bowl which has been garnished with crisp and cold lettuce leaves.
A three-ingredient salad that lives or dies on the tomatoes and on the length of the chill. The original gives no quantities, so treat it as a method rather than a formula.
- ProportionsAbout 2 lb ripe tomatoes to one or two green bell peppers serves four as a side. The peppers are an accent, not an equal partner; sliver them thin so no single bite is all pepper.
- French dressing, 1930s senseIn American books of this period French dressing means a plain oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- The chill is the instruction"Let stand till very cold" is the whole technique. Thirty to sixty minutes in the refrigerator lets salt draw juice from the tomatoes, which thins and extends the dressing into a light pan sauce at the bottom of the bowl.
- Do not overshoot itPast about two hours the tomatoes slump and go watery and the peppers lose their snap. If you need to work ahead, dress the peppers early and fold the tomatoes in shortly before serving.
- SaltingSalt the tomato chunks lightly on their own before dressing. Vinaigrette clings poorly to a wet tomato surface, and pre-salting gets the seasoning inside the fruit rather than pooling below it.
- The lettuce garnishThe leaves line and frame the bowl; they are not tossed in. Keep them dry and refrigerated until the moment of serving or the dressing will wilt them on contact.
- TomatoesRefrigeration blunts tomato flavour, so start with the ripest fruit available and season a little more assertively than you would for a room-temperature salad.
Menu books of the late 1920s and 1930s leaned hard on raw vegetable salads, and nutrition writing of the period pushed uncooked greens and "vitamines." The spread of home refrigeration made a salad that had to be served very cold easier to manage, though households with an icebox and dependable ice delivery could already chill food. The green bell pepper seems to have moved into wider raw salad use in the United States over roughly the same span, having been associated more with pickling and stuffing. The near-total absence of quantities is typical of the genre: these books assumed a cook who could judge a bowl by eye and needed only to be told what to put in it.