Tomatoes
1. Serve them oftenest plain sliced in shallow bowls on the table either for breakfast or dinner, with only broken ice laid on them. 2. Make a tomato salad by mixing in a small proportion of sliced cucumbers and onions and pouring over them vinegar, pepper and salt. Garnish with leaves of heart lettuce. 3. Slice tomatoes in individual deep dishes and pour a salad dressing over. 4. Tomatoes are liked by many people with a dressing of sugar and vinegar, like the lettuce sweet salad.
For there is a natural craving for something herbaceous, green, and sour, and if debarred from regular salads, from vinegar and sugar, people seek such substitutes as nature furnishes. "Bread itself was a delicacy seldom thought of, because hard to be obtained, and milk, butter and poultry were out of the question in this Scythian camp. * * * *--the meal which she had so sedulously arranged, and to which she now added a few bunches of cranberries, gathered in an adjacent morass." --Waverley. "While Joe was gone back in the canoe for the frying-pan, which had been left, we picked a couple of quarts of tree-cranberries for sauce. This sauce was very grateful to us who had been confined to hard bread, pork and moose-meat. --The Maine Woods. "I may mention that rhubarb was cut in thin slices and eaten with salt, quite raw. Melon seeds, salted, were also very plentiful." --Travels in Persia. "American college girls are much addicted to eating unripe apples with salt." --Medical Journal.
But now we have enough of salads. This is what too much salad brings a man to: "At last they found--his foragers for charms-- A little glassy-headed, hairless man, Who lived alone in a great wild on grass; Read but one book, and ever reading, grew So grated down and filed away with thought, So lean his eyes were monstrous; while the skin Clung but to crate and basket, ribs and spine. * * * * that old man Went back to his old wild and lived on grass, And vanished, and his book came down to me." --Merlin and Vivien.
Four ways of serving raw tomatoes, written for a hotel table where the cook needed variety more than precision. The quantities are left entirely to judgment, so the notes below are about technique and about what the period terms meant.
- Broken ice, not cubes"Broken ice" is ice chipped or cracked small, scattered over the slices just before they go out. Modern equivalent: a light scatter of crushed ice, added at the last moment. Left more than a few minutes it melts and dilutes the tomato.
- Chill the plate, not the tomatoRefrigeration flattens tomato flavour below about 55F. Slice at room temperature onto a chilled shallow bowl and ice at service, which is effectively what this method achieves.
- "Salad dressing" in this bookIn an 1890s American kitchen this usually means a cooked or boiled dressing thickened with egg and mustard, or a plain oil-and-vinegar French dressing. It does not mean a bottled emulsion. Either reading works here; the deep individual dish in No. 3 is there to hold the liquid.
- Proportions for No. 2None are given. A workable ratio is roughly four parts sliced tomato to one part cucumber and a scant amount of onion, sliced paper thin, with vinegar, salt and pepper poured over and the salad left ten minutes before serving.
- Heart lettuceThe tight pale inner leaves of a head lettuce, then usually a butterhead or an early crisphead. Romaine hearts or the inner leaves of Bibb serve the same garnishing purpose.
- The sugar-and-vinegar dressingNo. 4 is the old "sweet salad" treatment: a spoonful or so of sugar dissolved in vinegar, seasoned, poured over the slices. It reads oddly now but is of a piece with the sweet-sour cucumber and tomato salads still made across the Midwest and Pennsylvania Dutch country.
- PeelingThe author says nothing about peeling either way. Late-season tomatoes with tough skins are better blanched fifteen seconds and slipped, particularly for No. 3, where the skin curls away from the dressing.
- The quotationsEverything after the fourth instruction is the author's digression on the human appetite for sour green things, not part of the method. Nothing in the Waverley, Thoreau or Tennyson passages needs to be cooked.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to Jessup Whitehead, a Chicago hotel-kitchen writer of the 1880s and 90s whose books are famous for wandering off the subject at exactly this kind of length; a reader came for the tomatoes and left with Tennyson. The entry catches raw tomatoes at the moment they had finally become ordinary in the United States. Suspicion of the fruit had faded by the 1830s and 40s, and by the time this was written sliced tomatoes on ice were a standard summer item on American hotel breakfast and dinner cards, cheap enough to serve daily and needing no cooking at all. The digression on sour and herbaceous cravings reflects a real preoccupation of the period: fresh green food was seasonal, and salad greens were not reliably available.