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Lettuce and Tomato Salad
Peel and chill three tomatoes. Cut in halves crosswise, arrange each half on a lettuce leaf. Garnish with Mayonnaise Dressing forced through a pastry bag and tube. If tomatoes are small, cut in quarters, and allow one tomato to each lettuce leaf.
An assembly rather than a cooked dish, so almost everything rides on the two preparatory steps the text gives in four words: peel, and chill.
- PeelingScore an X in the blossom end, drop the tomatoes into boiling water for 15-30 seconds, then into ice water; the skins slip off. Cooks of the period would have scalded them the same way or pared them with a sharp knife.
- Chill properlyRefrigerate the peeled tomatoes for at least an hour before slicing. Peeled tomatoes weep, so drain the cut halves cut-side down on paper for a few minutes or the mayonnaise will slide off into a pink puddle.
- MayonnaiseThe book's own Mayonnaise Dressing is an uncooked emulsion of raw yolk, oil, and vinegar or lemon. If serving anyone pregnant, elderly, or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise, which pipes just as well.
- Piping consistencyHomemade mayonnaise is often too loose for a pastry tube. Beat in a little more oil, or chill it hard, until it holds a ridge. A star tube gives a rosette; a plain tube gives a neater modern line.
- The lettuceIn this period that meant a soft butterhead or the loose leaf of a kitchen garden, chosen for cupping a tomato half. Bibb or Boston lettuce is the closest equivalent; iceberg leaves are too rigid and romaine too long.
- Tomato sizeNineteenth-century garden tomatoes were often smaller and more lobed than a modern supermarket beefsteak. Three modern large tomatoes halved will overwhelm a leaf; medium tomatoes, or the quartering the recipe allows, keep the proportions right.
- Yield and servingThree tomatoes halved give six salads as a first course or six side plates. Serve on chilled plates and dress at the last moment, since the salad has no dressing to soak into and nothing gained by standing.
Peeled tomatoes on a lettuce leaf under a rosette of mayonnaise is a set piece of American cooking-school style at the turn of the twentieth century, when a salad was expected to look composed rather than tossed. The pastry bag is the tell: Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book was written for households and for the training of cooks who would work in them, and part of that training was making plain food look deliberate. Tomatoes themselves had only recently become uncontroversial table fare in the United States; long grown but long regarded with suspicion, they were widely accepted as a raw salad vegetable by the 1880s and 1890s. Mayonnaise had arrived earlier in the century by way of French cookery and was, in this period, still routinely made at home by hand with oil dripped into yolk, which is why cookbooks of the era give the dressing its own capitalized recipe and simply cross-reference it, as here.