Tulip Salad
4 ripe tomatoes 12 chopped pecans 1 quart best cider vinegar Mayonnaise dressing Lettuce 1 tablespoon peppercorns Scald the tomatoes; remove the skins and chill thoroughly. Then with a sharp knife cut from blossom-end to stem-end into with a sharp knife cut from blossom-end to stem-end into points and press open, leaving a round bulb of seeds in the center. Mix a little Mayonnaise with the pecans and place a spoonful on the top of each bulb. Serve on lettuce leaves.
A simple composed salad from the era when a tomato cut into petals counted as a centerpiece. Most of the work is in the knife cuts and the chilling.
- Two ingredients belong to another recipeTwo ingredients are never used -- The quart of cider vinegar and the tablespoon of peppercorns appear in the list but nowhere in the method, and nothing in a tulip salad calls for them. They look like a printing or compiling error rather than part of this dish. Ignore them.
- Scald and peelThirty to sixty seconds in boiling water, then straight into ice water; the skins slip off with no cooking of the flesh underneath. Score a shallow X on the blossom end first if the skins are stubborn.
- Chill hard before cuttingA cold, firm tomato cuts into clean points; a room-temperature peeled one collapses. An hour in the refrigerator is the difference between a tulip and a puddle.
- Cutting the petalsCut from the blossom end down toward the stem, stopping short of the base so the sections stay joined; the recipe does not say how many cuts, and four to six gives workable points. Ease the points outward and leave the seed core standing in the middle as the flower's heart.
- The pecansTwelve chopped pecans comes to something like three tablespoons, depending on whether halves or whole nuts are meant; enough for four tomatoes either way. Toasting them briefly is not in the original but improves them considerably.
- MayonnaiseMayonnaise at this date was usually made at home, and tended to be looser and sharper than the jarred kind. Thin commercial mayonnaise with a little lemon juice or cream so it binds the nuts without sitting in a stiff lump.
- YieldFour salads, one tomato each, as a first course or a lunch plate alongside something else.
The tulip salad belongs to a long American vogue, roughly 1890 through the 1930s, for salads shaped into flowers, baskets, birds and candles — food arranged to be looked at as much as eaten, and a way for a hostess to show effort without a cook. Tomatoes were ideal for it: cheap in season, brightly colored, and firm enough to hold a cut shape once chilled. Mayonnaise appears here as a matter of course, one of several dressings then spooned over fruit and vegetables alike in a way that reads oddly now. The quart of vinegar sitting unused in the ingredient list remains unexplained.