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Cucumber Salad. No. 2
Two cucumbers, four large tomatoes, French dressing, boiled dressing. Peel and cut the cucumbers into quarter-inch slices. Soak in the water. Scald and peel the tomatoes. Cut them in halves and remove the seeds. Drain and cut the cucumbers in small dice, macerate them with a French dressing. Put them into the cavities, and, when ready to serve, put a spoonful of boiled dressing on each.
A stuffed-tomato salad of the period, where the tomato half is the vessel and two dressings do different jobs. The original assumes you already know what "French dressing" and "boiled dressing" meant in a turn-of-the-century kitchen.
- "Soak in the water"The recipe never says what water. Period practice was ice water, sometimes lightly salted, for 20-30 minutes to crisp the slices; the salted version draws out liquid and needs rinsing. Either reading is defensible, but the point is firm, cold, well-drained cucumber.
- Drain harder than you thinkThis is the hinge. Cucumber holds a great deal of water, and dressing pulls out more. Drain the dice on a towel after macerating or the boiled dressing will slide off into a puddle in the tomato shell.
- French dressing, 1900 senseOil and vinegar in roughly three-to-one, with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to hold together. Not the sweet orange bottled product that later took the name. Do not use anything sugared here.
- Boiled dressingA cooked dressing of eggs or yolks, vinegar, mustard, a little sugar and often flour or butter, thickened over hot water and cooled. It was the everyday alternative to mayonnaise. Cook it to at least 160F and chill it before spooning on.
- Scalding the tomatoesTen to twenty seconds in boiling water, then straight into cold water; the skins slip off. Longer and the flesh softens and the shells collapse when filled.
- Macerating timeFifteen to twenty minutes is enough. Left an hour, the cucumber goes limp and weeps, which defeats the earlier soaking.
- Assembly and timingFill the shells shortly before serving and add the boiled dressing at the last moment, as the original directs. Cut tomatoes held dressed on a plate go watery quickly.
- YieldFour tomatoes halved gives eight filled halves, which serves four as a first course or side, two per plate.
Books like this one belong to the American salad boom of the 1890s and 1900s, when refrigeration, commercial ice and year-round produce turned salad from a plain dish of dressed greens into a course with construction to it. Hollowed tomatoes, moulded aspics and cases of cucumber or pepper were the fashion, and a compendium of salad variations was exactly the sort of thing a household with a cook and a set of salad plates would buy. The two dressings tell you something about the period kitchen: an oil-and-vinegar French dressing to season and season quickly, and a cooked, egg-thickened boiled dressing to finish, which is often said to have kept better and been more forgiving than raw-yolk mayonnaise in a warm larder. The habit of soaking sliced cucumber in ice water is older still, and is sometimes linked to a long-held belief that cucumbers were cold, watery and hard to digest unless firmed and well dressed.