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Combination Salad
Scald tomatoes; remove the skin and place them on ice. Wash and drain lettuce; arrange in a salad bowl; slice the tomatoes over it and serve with Mayonnaise or French dressing.
A two-ingredient salad whose only technique is the scald-and-peel, a step that was standard practice when tomato skins were tougher than today's thin-skinned market varieties.
- Scalding tomatoesDip them in boiling water 15-30 seconds, until the skin splits, then move them straight to cold water. Longer than that and the outer flesh cooks and turns mealy.
- "Place them on ice"This means chill them thoroughly before slicing, which the modern refrigerator handles. A peeled tomato firms up noticeably after 30-60 minutes cold and slices far more cleanly.
- Whether to peel at allHeirloom and beefsteak tomatoes with thick skins genuinely benefit. Modern hybrid slicers and small varieties do not, and peeling them mostly costs you juice.
- Draining the lettuceDrain here means dry. Water left clinging thins the dressing and keeps mayonnaise from clinging to the leaves.
- Assembly orderSlice the tomatoes over the lettuce at the last moment and dress at the table. Salted or dressed tomatoes shed liquid within minutes and will flood the bottom of the bowl.
- DressingFrench dressing in a book of this period is a simple oil-and-vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked to a temporary emulsion; proportions vary from book to book, commonly somewhere between two and three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled product sold under that name now.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. A medium head of lettuce with three or four tomatoes would serve about four to six as a side.
"Combination salad" was a catch-all term in American cookery of the early twentieth century for any salad of two or more raw vegetables served together, as opposed to a plain lettuce salad or a single-vegetable one dressed alone. Cookbooks of the 1880s onward often instructed cooks to peel, chill and sugar tomatoes, though that appears to have been simply a common serving style. The instruction to scald and ice belongs to that era of thick-skinned field tomatoes and iceboxes, when a cold salad was a small luxury of service rather than a default. Mayonnaise or French dressing offered as alternatives marks the same moment, when the two were often paired on American salad lists.