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Tomatoes Stuffed with Nuts and Celery
Peel the tomatoes; cut out a circular piece at the stem end of each and scoop out the flesh so as to form cups. Chill thoroughly, then fill with English walnut or pecan meats, broken into pieces, and celery, cut into small pieces and mixed with mayonnaise. Serve on lettuce leaves.
A stuffed-tomato salad of the ladies'-luncheon era, and one that stands or falls on the tomatoes themselves. The original assumes you know how to skin a tomato and make mayonnaise; everything else is assembly.
- Peeling without cookingScore an X in the base, drop the tomatoes into boiling water for 15-20 seconds, then into ice water; the skins slip off. Any longer and the outer flesh softens and the cups slump.
- Drain the shellsAfter scooping, salt the insides lightly and invert the cups on a rack or paper towel for 20-30 minutes before chilling. Tomatoes shed a great deal of liquid, and undrained cups will thin the mayonnaise into a puddle on the lettuce.
- Chill thoroughlyRead this as at least an hour in the refrigerator. The cook this was written for was most likely working with an icebox, and the instruction carried more weight than it looks.
- English walnutSimply the common walnut, as distinct from the native American black walnut, which is far more assertive and would overwhelm the celery. Pecans are the milder of the two options given.
- Toasting the nutsNot in the original, but five to seven minutes in a 350F oven, cooled completely, sharpens the flavor and keeps the pieces from going soft against the wet filling.
- MayonnaiseThe book means a made-from-scratch emulsion of yolk, oil, and vinegar or lemon, often seasoned with mustard, thicker and sharper than the jarred kind. If you make your own and are serving anyone elderly, pregnant, or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs, since nothing here is cooked.
- Dress at the last momentMix the celery and nuts with the mayonnaise only when you are ready to fill and serve. Held together, the celery weeps and the nuts go limp.
- Yield and proportionOne medium tomato per person as a salad course. Figure roughly a half cup of celery and a quarter cup of nut meats per four tomatoes, bound with two to three tablespoons of mayonnaise.
Stuffed raw tomatoes ran through American cookery from about the 1890s into the 1930s, and books of this kind, aimed at the hostess putting on a light luncheon or a chafing-dish supper, are thick with them. The tomato cup did the work a mold or a pastry case did elsewhere: it made a cold salad look composed and individual on the plate. The filling here is the standard trio of that moment, nuts for richness, celery for crunch, mayonnaise to bind. It is worth remembering that eating tomatoes raw and unsauced was still a relatively recent habit in nineteenth-century America; earlier cooks generally stewed or baked them at length, and salads like this one belong to the period when the tomato had finally settled into the cold course.