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Scallop and Tomato Salad
One pint of scallops, six tomatoes, mayonnaise dressing, two bunches of water cress.
Cook the scallops as directed in the preceding recipe. Cut them into dice. Peel the tomatoes, cut a slice from the stem end, scoop out the ends, and fill the cavities with the scallop dice and put a tablespoonful of mayonnaise on each. Serve on the cresses.
A stuffed-tomato salad of the sort that filled the salad course in Edwardian menus. The original leans on an earlier recipe in the book for cooking the scallops, so the timing is the thing to get right.
- The hinge: cook the scallops brieflyWhatever the preceding recipe said, scallops need only two to three minutes in barely simmering salted water, until just opaque through. Anything longer and the dice turn to rubber and weep liquid into the tomato.
- A pint of scallopsSold by volume in this period; a pint of shucked scallops is roughly 1 lb / 450 g. Bay scallops can be halved rather than diced; large sea scallops should be cut into 1/2-inch cubes.
- Dry them before dressingDrain the cooked scallops and pat them dry, then chill. Warm or wet scallops will thin the mayonnaise and the filling will slump out of the tomatoes.
- Peeling the tomatoesDip them in boiling water for 15-20 seconds and the skins slip off. Choose firm, medium tomatoes that will stand upright once hollowed; salt the insides lightly and invert them for ten minutes to drain.
- MayonnaiseThe book assumes a hand-made mayonnaise of raw yolk and oil. If you make your own and are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs, or use a good commercial mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice.
- Water cressTwo bunches is a generous bed for six tomatoes. Trim the thick stems, wash well in cold water, and dress the cress with nothing more than a little lemon and salt so it does not compete with the mayonnaise.
- Yield and servingSix tomatoes, so six first-course servings. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep refrigerated; the tomatoes lose their shape if they stand filled.
Ninety-Nine Salads belongs to the run of small single-subject cookbooks published under the name Olive Green around 1910, a pen name generally attributed to the novelist Myrtle Reed. Books like this one arrived just as the salad course was becoming a fixed feature of American middle-class dinners, and the hollowed tomato was its workhorse: a self-contained cup that could be filled with anything cold and diced, from chicken to cucumber to shellfish, and set on a leaf for presentation. Scallops here are a mark of the period's confidence in cheap coastal seafood — sold by the pint straight from the shucker, and treated much as one would treat cold lobster or crab in the same book. The watercress base is equally of its time, peppery cress being a common garnish green of the period.