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Stuffed Tomatoes
Peel sound tomatoes, and scoop from stem end a part of center.
Place them on ice and just before serving fill with celery cut fine and mixed with mayonnaise. Put a little mayonnaise on lettuce leaves and place the stuffed tomato on the dressing in the center of each leaf.
Tomatoes may be stuffed in the same way with chopped veal, celery and veal or chicken, celery and sweetbreads or chopped hard-boiled eggs and shredded lettuce.
A very pretty salad may be made by preparing the tomatoes as above, The highest medical authorities are unanimous in their praise of olive oil. partly filling them with mayonnaise and pressing into each one half of a hard-boiled egg, letting the rounded top rise a little above the tomato, and serve on lettuce leaves as above. 3. 3. 8.
A ladies'-luncheon salad from an olive oil promoter's booklet, and it still works if you treat the tomato as a cold vessel rather than a cooked thing. Two lines in the text need untangling before you start.
- The stray sentence"The highest medical authorities are unanimous in their praise of olive oil." is an advertising slogan that the typesetter dropped into the middle of the instructions. It is not part of the method. The trailing "3. 3. 8." is a printer's or index mark.
- PeelingNo method is given. Drop the tomatoes into boiling water for 15-30 seconds, then into ice water, and the skins slip off. Choose firm, ripe medium tomatoes; a soft one will collapse once hollowed.
- "Place them on ice"Means chilled in the icebox or set in a bed of crushed ice, not frozen. Half an hour in the refrigerator does the same job. Salt the hollowed insides lightly and invert them to drain while they chill, or the filling turns watery.
- Fill at the last minuteThis is the hinge of the recipe and the original says so. Celery and mayonnaise in a peeled tomato leaches liquid within minutes; stuff them as the plates go out.
- MayonnaiseThe book assumes homemade mayonnaise with raw yolk. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised, use pasteurized eggs or a commercial mayonnaise, and keep the assembled salads cold throughout.
- The meat variationsVeal, chicken and sweetbreads are all to be fully cooked and thoroughly chilled before they go anywhere near the tomato. Sweetbreads in particular need soaking, blanching, peeling and pressing first; they are not a raw-to-plate ingredient.
- YieldOne stuffed tomato per person as a first course or luncheon salad. Figure about a cup of finely diced celery and 1/3 cup mayonnaise for four tomatoes.
This comes from one of the small recipe booklets issued by an olive oil company, given away to persuade American cooks that olive oil belonged in the pantry at a time when many household salad dressings were built on cream, vinegar and boiled starch. The intrusive line in praise of olive oil, and the health claims that go with it, are the whole reason the booklet exists. The dish itself belongs to the era of the composed salad, when a hollowed tomato, a lettuce leaf and a spoonful of mayonnaise were common architecture on a hotel or club luncheon plate, and elegance was measured by how neatly a thing could be made to stand up. The suggested fillings map the leftovers of a well-off kitchen: cold veal, cold chicken, sweetbreads, hard-boiled egg.