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Tomato and Lettuce Salad
The tomatoes should be sliced or quartered and served on crisp lettuce leaves. Dressing should not be put on until immediately before serving. Serve with French dressing, Russian dressing or mayonnaise. (A pleasing variation of the usual lettuce and tomato salad may be made by cutting the lettuce almost but not quite as fine as slaw, and adding a little very finely chopped onion.) Ф 8. 3. 3- Ф
A method rather than a formula, from a booklet that assumed the reader already knew how to make a dressing. The only real technique here is timing.
- Dress at the last momentThe instruction to hold the dressing until serving is the whole point of the recipe. Salt and acid draw water out of both tomato and lettuce within minutes, leaving a puddle at the bottom of the bowl and limp leaves above it.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For four servings, figure two large ripe tomatoes and one head of romaine, Boston or iceberg, with about a third of a cup of dressing.
- French dressing, 1920s senseFrench dressing, period sense -- In a booklet of this kind French dressing means a simple shaken vinaigrette of olive oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, commonly around three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- Russian dressingIn this period broadly a mayonnaise-based dressing with chili sauce or ketchup, often with grated onion or chopped pimiento; recipes varied. Any modern version will suit the salad.
- MayonnaiseThe period assumption was homemade. If you make your own with raw yolks, use pasteurised eggs or eat it the same day, and keep it refrigerated.
- Crisping the lettuce"Crisp" is doing work here. Wash the leaves, then dry them thoroughly and chill for half an hour; dressing will cling to dry leaves and slide off wet ones.
- The slaw variationShred the lettuce coarsely, wider than slaw, and use the onion sparingly, finely minced. Shredded lettuce wilts faster than whole leaves, so this version in particular should be tossed at the table.
- PeelingNot called for, and unnecessary with thin-skinned summer tomatoes. If your tomatoes have tough skins, a ten-second dip in boiling water loosens them without cooking the flesh.
Booklets like this one are generally traced to olive oil importers, who are often said to have wanted to teach American cooks a use for a product still regarded as medicinal or foreign in the early twentieth century he dosing spoon. A tomato and lettuce salad needed no recipe even then, which is why the entry reads as a set of cautions instead: it exists to establish that the oil-and-vinegar dressing is the ordinary and expected finish. Three dressings are offered, from plain vinaigrette up through the mayonnaise-based Russian, which is said to have become fashionable in American hotel dining rooms in the decades on either side of the First World War.