Surprises
3/4 cup cold chopped meat 1/2 tablespoon chopped onion 1/2 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce Lettuce 1/2 saltspoon salt 4 tablespoons Mayonnaise 4 tomatoes Season the meat with onion, sauce and salt, and mix with the dressing. Have the tomatoes very cold; cut a slice from the stem end and scoop out the seeded portion. Fill each with the salad mixture and serve on a leaf of crisp lettuce.
A stuffed-tomato salad built to use up yesterday's roast. The whole thing depends on temperature and drainage, not on technique.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Taste after mixing, since the Worcestershire and the mayonnaise both carry salt.
- The hinge: drain the shellsAfter scooping, salt the hollowed tomatoes lightly and invert them on a rack for 15 to 20 minutes. Otherwise the released juice thins the dressing into a pink puddle on the lettuce.
- Cold chopped meatAny cooked leftover roast beef, lamb, veal, ham or chicken, cut in small dice rather than ground. Three quarters of a cup is roughly 4 ounces. Meat that has been refrigerated for more than three or four days should not be served cold and undressed like this.
- Chopped onionHalf a tablespoon is a small piece of onion, minced fine. A mild sweet onion or the white of a scallion tends to suit a cold salad better than a strong yellow one, which can sharpen as it sits in mayonnaise.
- MayonnaiseThe original would have meant a dressing made in the kitchen. If you make it fresh, use pasteurized eggs, since nothing in this dish is cooked.
- TomatoesMedium tomatoes, roughly 5 to 6 ounces each, firm enough to stand up. A thin slice off the base helps if the shell wobbles.
- ServingFour salads, one per person, as a luncheon course. Assemble no more than half an hour before serving and hold in the refrigerator, dressing and shells kept apart if you need longer.
"Surprises" is a period name for the whole family of hollowed vegetables and fruits hiding a dressed filling, the joke being that the diner does not know what is inside until the fork goes in. Stuffed raw tomatoes appear on American luncheon menus in the first decades of the twentieth century, when bottled mayonnaise and Worcestershire sauce were increasingly available to home cooks. The dish also does quiet economic work: a leaflet-style cookbook like Mrs. Fryer's, apparently sold as loose leaves to be sorted into a housekeeper's binder, was aimed at a cook expected to turn small quantities of cold roast into something presentable, and three quarters of a cup of chopped meat stretched across four plates does exactly that.