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Cucumber and Tomato Salad
Arrange sliced tomatoes on a bed of lettuce leaves. Pile on each slice, cucumber cubes cut one-half inch square. Serve with French or Mayonnaise Dressing.
An assembly recipe rather than a cooked one, so almost everything depends on how the vegetables are handled before they reach the plate. Two details in the original are worth translating.
- Salt the tomatoes, not the saladThe recipe says nothing about seasoning, but salting each slice lightly and letting it stand a few minutes on a plate rather than on the lettuce keeps the drawn-out juice from pooling and wilting the leaves.
- Half-inch cubes are deliberateThe cucumber is cut in cubes, not slices, so it sits in a pile on the tomato round and keeps its crunch against the softer fruit. Peel and seed the cucumber first if it is a waxed supermarket variety; an English or Persian cucumber can be left unpeeled.
- Chill and drain the cucumberFifteen minutes in cold water firms cut cucumber, but drain it thoroughly on a towel or the dressing will slide off.
- "French dressing" in this bookNot a sweet orange bottled dressing. It means oil and vinegar with salt and pepper and no sugar; the book's own proportions run about two parts oil to one of vinegar.
- Mayonnaise dressingThe book's mayonnaise is raw-yolk, made to order. Commercial mayonnaise, thinned with a little lemon juice or cream, gives the same effect without keeping a raw-egg sauce at room temperature.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; reckon roughly one medium tomato and about a third of a cucumber per person, dressed at the last moment. Assembled salads of this type are best served promptly, before the lettuce wilts.
Recipes like this one mark the point at which the tomato became ordinary in American cooking. Tomatoes are often said to have been regarded with suspicion well into the middle of the nineteenth century, and they were most often cooked at length or stewed; by the time this book appeared in 1896 they were being sliced raw and put on lettuce without comment. The salad chapter of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is full of these terse assembly formulas, and their brevity is the point: Fannie Farmer expected the reader to have already mastered the two dressings elsewhere in the book, so the entry only needs to specify the arrangement. The insistence on a "bed of lettuce leaves" and a neat half-inch dice reflects the domestic-science preference for salads that looked composed and measured rather than tossed together.