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Novel Tomato Salad
1 cup cherry tomatoes 1 cup small yellow tomatoes 1 clove garlic 1 tablespoon chopped parsley French dressing Lettuce Scald the tomatoes; peel carefully and set on the ice to cool. At serving time rub the salad bowl with garlic and line with heart leaves of lettuce. Place the yellow tomatoes in the center and the red ones around them. Cover with French dressing and sprinkle with the parsley.
A cold composed salad that depends almost entirely on knife work and temperature; there is no cooking beyond a brief dip in boiling water. Two lines in the original belong to something else.
- The stray last line"1/4 box gelatine 1/2 cup cold water" -- belongs to another recipe that has run into this one; it has nothing to do with this salad. Ignore it.
- Peeling small tomatoesScalding means 10-15 seconds in boiling water, then straight into ice water; cherry tomatoes split and turn to mush if left longer. Score the skin at the stem end first and it will slip off in one piece.
- "Set on the ice"An icebox instruction. Chill them in the refrigerator or over a bowl of ice water for about 30 minutes -- peeled tomatoes at room temperature weep and dilute the dressing.
- The garlicCut the clove in half and rub the cut face hard around the dry bowl. That is the whole of the garlic in the dish; it is meant as a trace, not a flavour of its own.
- French dressingIn this period that means a simple shaken vinaigrette -- roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper -- not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under the name today.
- Yellow tomatoesSmall yellow varieties were common in home gardens and are again sold in many markets as yellow cherry or pear tomatoes. Any small pale tomato works; the point is the colour contrast against the red ring.
- Dress at the last minuteSkinned tomatoes absorb dressing fast and collapse. Assemble the bowl, then pour and scatter the parsley as it goes to the table.
- YieldTwo cups of tomatoes serves four as a side salad.
The book comes from an era when the appearance of a salad on the plate counted for a great deal, and "novel" here appears to refer to the arrangement rather than to any new ingredient. Small yellow tomatoes, sometimes sold as yellow pear or yellow plum, were a common kitchen-garden crop in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and largely dropped out of commercial produce before the heirloom revival brought them back. Rubbing the bowl with a cut clove of garlic is a technique generally traced to French practice, and in many American household recipes of the period garlic appeared in no stronger form than this.