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Tomato-and-Onion Salad
Peel and shred four tomatoes, slice thinly a very mild onion and separate into rings; dress freely with oil and tarragon vinegar, and season with salt and pepper. Serve on lettuce leaves, sprinkling the whole with fine - chopped parsley and green peppers.
Endive,-Tomato-and-Green-String-Bean Salad.
Dress the well-blanched stalks of a head of endive, three tomatoes, peeled, cut in halves and chilled, and a cup of cold cooked string beans, separately, with French dressing, using in the dressing tarragon vinegar and a few drops of onion juice; then arrange on a serving-dish.
Two salads run together in one paragraph: a dressed tomato-and-onion, and a composed endive, tomato and string bean plate. Both hang on the same seasonings, tarragon vinegar and onion juice, which is where most of the flavor lives.
- "Shred" the tomatoesIn this period shred means to cut into thin strips or slim wedges with a knife, not to grate. Grating peeled tomatoes gives you pulp and a watery plate.
- PeelingScore the blossom end, dip in boiling water for 15-20 seconds, then into ice water and the skins slip off. Worth doing, since the dressing will not cling to skin.
- Tarragon vinegarSold ready-made, or steep a large sprig of fresh tarragon in a cup of white wine vinegar for a week. Plain white vinegar is harsher and misses the point of both salads.
- French dressing, 1900 senseOil and vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked to a temporary emulsion; period proportions vary, running from roughly two to three parts oil to one of vinegar. Some contemporary versions add mustard or paprika, but nothing in this recipe calls for them.
- Onion juiceGrate a piece of onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion through a sieve. A few drops is literal here, it is meant to be felt rather than tasted.
- Green peppersSweet bell peppers, not chiles. Chopped fine and raw, they are a garnish alongside the parsley.
- Blanched endiveBlanched here refers to the growing, not the pot: the head is kept from the light so the stalks stay pale and mild. Whether the book means Belgian endive (witloof) or a garden-blanched curly endive is not clear from the text. Either way, do not boil it; separate the head into individual leaves.
- Dress separatelyThe hinge of the second salad. Each of the three components takes dressing on its own before being arranged, so the beans do not stain the endive and the tomato juice does not thin everything into one puddle.
- YieldFour tomatoes will serve four as a side salad. The endive plate serves three or four; assemble it at the last minute, since tomatoes weep once salted.
This book was compiled at the turn of the twentieth century, when the salad course was still a mark of a fashionable American table and the Boston Cooking School was busy codifying what belonged on it. The tarragon vinegar and the drops of onion juice are the signature of the period's genteel dressing: flavor delivered by infusion and extract rather than by anything chunky enough to see. Forced in darkness and grown in small quantities, the endive of the period was an expensive winter luxury, which is why it earns a composed, separately dressed presentation rather than being tossed in with everything else.