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Tomato and Cucumber Salad
Six tomatoes, two cucumbers, water cress, a few drops of onion juice, French or mayonnaise dressing, lettuce.
Pare and chop the cucumbers rather fine, mix into it a little chopped water cress, then add a few drops of onion juice. Peel the tomatoes, cut a slice from the stem end, take out the seeds, and fill vacancies with the cucumber. Arrange the tomatoes on lettuce leaves, and pour over them either a French or mayonnaise dressing.
A stuffed-tomato salad of the sort that filled American salad books around the turn of the twentieth century. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the assumptions behind it are worth spelling out.
- Drain the tomato shellsAfter coring and seeding, salt the insides lightly and invert them on a rack for 15 to 20 minutes. The recipe assumes you know this; skip it and the dressing pools into tomato water on the plate.
- Peeling tomatoesThe recipe simply says to peel, with no method given. Score an X in the base, 15 to 20 seconds in boiling water, then into ice water and the skin slips off. Modern thin-skinned tomatoes can be left unpeeled if you prefer.
- Cucumbers"Pare" means peel. Cucumbers of the period were often thicker-skinned and seedier than today's, so paring and fine chopping made sense; with an English or Persian cucumber, halve and scrape out the seed core rather than peeling, or the filling turns watery.
- Onion juiceA standard flavouring of the era, made by halving an onion and pressing it on a reamer or grating it and squeezing the pulp through cloth. A few drops means a few drops: it is meant to be felt rather than tasted. Grated shallot works in its place.
- Water cressChopped watercress here is a seasoning, not a bed. Its pepperiness is doing the work that arugula or a little dill might do now. Use the leaves and thin upper stems only.
- Which dressingFrench dressing in this period generally means a simple oil-and-vinegar with salt and pepper, commonly around three parts oil to one of vinegar, whisked to order; recipes vary, and some period versions add mustard or paprika. If dressing the filling as well as the tomatoes, do it just before serving.
- YieldSix tomatoes, so six servings as a first course or side. The salad does not hold: assemble within half an hour of the table, and keep the filled tomatoes chilled until then.
Stuffed-tomato salads ran through American and British cookery books from the 1890s into the 1930s, a period when the salad course was taken seriously. The tomato had shed the last of its suspect reputation by then and was cheap in summer, while the individually composed salad on a lettuce leaf suited a preference for food that arrived at the table already portioned rather than served from a bowl. Onion juice is characteristic of the period: pressed or grated onion appears frequently in these books as a way of getting allium flavour into a cold dish without visible pieces. Watercress, cheap and widely grown in flowing beds near cities, was a standard peppery green before arugula reached general use.