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Salad à la Russe
Peel six tomatoes, remove thin slices from top of each, and take out seeds and pulp. Sprinkle inside with salt, invert, and let stand one-half hour. Place seeds and pulp removed from tomatoes in a strainer to drain. Mix onethird cup cucumbers cut in dice, one-third cup cold cooked peas, one-fourth cup pickles finely chopped, one-third cup tomato pulp, and two tablespoons capers. Season with salt, pepper, and vinegar. Put in a cheese-cloth and squeeze; then add one-half cup cold cooked chicken cut in very small dice. Mix with Mayonnaise Dressing, refill tomatoes, sprinkle with finely chopped parsley, and place each on a lettuce leaf.
A stuffed-tomato salad from the era when a composed cold plate was the mark of a careful hostess. Nothing here is difficult, but two steps carry the whole dish: the half-hour draining of the salted tomato shells and the squeeze in cheesecloth. Skip either and the mayonnaise slides out in a pink puddle.
- The hinge: squeeze the filling dryThe vegetables are dressed with vinegar, wrapped in cheesecloth and pressed before the mayonnaise goes in. This is not fussiness; cucumber and tomato pulp shed a surprising amount of liquid and will thin the dressing to soup within minutes. Press firmly, then loosen the mixture with a fork before dressing it.
- TomatoesChoose firm, unblemished round tomatoes, not soft slicers or beefsteaks. After hollowing and salting, invert them on a rack over a plate so the salt draws water out rather than pooling underneath.
- "Pickles"In this period the word generally means cucumber pickles in vinegar brine — small sour gherkins rather than sweet bread-and-butter chips, which will throw the seasoning off. Chop them fine and blot them.
- Cucumbers cut in dicePeel and seed them first, and measure the dice rather than estimating by the cucumber.
- Cold cooked peasMost likely leftovers from another meal. Frozen peas dropped in boiling water for one minute and cooled work better than canned, which are soft enough to smear into the dressing.
- MayonnaiseThe book's own Mayonnaise Dressing is raw-yolk. If you make it from scratch, use pasteurized eggs, or use a good jarred mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice — the filling wants a dressing loose enough to coat, not to hold a peak.
- Temperature and timingCooked chicken bound in mayonnaise is a dish to keep cold. Assemble it shortly before serving and refrigerate the filled tomatoes; do not let filled shells stand at room temperature for more than an hour or so.
- YieldSix tomatoes, so six first-course or luncheon servings.
"À la Russe" in nineteenth-century cookery signals the Russian-style salad of diced cooked vegetables and meat bound in mayonnaise, known abroad as salade russe and associated with the French-trained restaurant kitchens of nineteenth-century Russia; it is related to the dish Russians now call Olivier salad, though the line of descent is not settled. By the 1890s the name had become a loose label in English and American cookbooks for almost any small-diced composed salad in a mayonnaise, and this version is thoroughly Americanized: chicken instead of tongue or game, capers and pickles for sharpness, and the whole thing served in a hollowed tomato on a lettuce leaf. The tomato case itself was a fashion of the period, when salads were judged partly as architecture.