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Tomato Surprise Salad
6 tomatoes 3/4 cup diced cucumber 1/2 cup diced, cooked chicken 1/4 cup chopped nuts 1/4 cup mayonnaise dressing Lettuce Garnish of truffles or walnut-meats Select medium-sized, smooth tomatoes. Scald and remove the skins. Chill. Carefully scoop the inside out of the tomatoes. Remove the seeds from the pulp. Chill all ingredients, and when ready to serve, mix the chicken, cucumber, tomato pulp, and nuts with the mayonnaise dressing. Add more salt if needed. Fill the tomatoes. Arrange on lettuce leaves. Garnish with mayonnaise and decorate each tomato top with a slice of truffle or with halves of shelled nuts.
A stuffed-tomato salad of the 1920s, built to be assembled cold at the last minute. Nothing here is technically difficult, but the recipe assumes a few habits that are worth spelling out.
- Serves sixOne tomato per person, as a first course or a lunch plate. The filling comes to roughly 2 cups, which is about right for six medium tomatoes hollowed out.
- Peeling"Scald and remove the skins" means 15 to 30 seconds in boiling water, then straight into ice water; score the skin at the blossom end first and it will slip off. Peeled tomatoes bruise easily, so handle them by the shoulders.
- Drain before fillingThe hinge of the dish. Salt the hollowed shells lightly and invert them on a rack for 15 to 20 minutes, and drain the reserved pulp in a sieve. Otherwise the mayonnaise thins and the salad floods the lettuce.
- Seeding the pulpPush the scooped flesh through a coarse sieve or simply squeeze out the seed jelly by hand. What you want back in the salad is the firm flesh, chopped, not the watery centre.
- Cooked chickenPoached or leftover roast breast, cut in 1/4-inch dice. Half a cup is on the order of 2 1/2 to 3 ounces, part of a small half-breast.
- Mayonnaise dressingPeriod mayonnaise dressing was generally thicker and sharper than the modern jarred kind. If using commercial mayonnaise, taste for salt, as the recipe directs.
- TrufflesA thinly sliced canned black truffle was a cheaper garnish in the period than it is now. The recipe offers walnut-meats as the alternative; a caper or a sliver of black olive reads much the same on the plate.
- TimingEverything can be prepped hours ahead, but mix and fill only when the plates are going out; filled tomatoes weep if they are held.
The stuffed tomato was a fixture of American salad courses from the 1890s through the 1930s, when a "salad" on a formal menu often meant a composed, molded or filled construction rather than dressed greens. The lettuce leaf here is a liner, not an ingredient. The pattern was adaptable to whatever cold cooked protein a household had on hand, which is much of its appeal in a book like this: chicken, crab, shrimp or plain cucumber all went into the same shell. The "surprise" of the title appears to be that the filling is hidden until the tomato is cut, a naming convention shared with other period dishes that concealed one thing inside another. The truffle slice on top is a small piece of evidence about the audience -- The Delineator was a mass-circulation women's magazine, and here a luxurious garnish is offered alongside a workaday substitute.