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Sliced Tomatoes
Wipe, and cover with boiling water; let stand one minute, when they may be easily skinned. Chill thoroughly, and cut in one-third inch slices.
Two sentences of instruction that assume you already know what to do with the slices. The technique is sound, and the only real question is whether you want peeled tomatoes at all.
- The hinge: one minute, no moreThe boiling water is only there to loosen the skin, not to cook the flesh. Leave a ripe tomato in longer and the outer layer turns mealy and weeps when sliced.
- Chill thoroughly means chillWarm tomato flesh tears under a knife. After skinning, drop the tomatoes into ice water or refrigerate them until firm; the difference in how cleanly they slice is considerable.
- Whether to peel at allCookery writing of this period often treats tomato skin as coarse or indigestible, which may be why blanching is given as routine. Modern thin-skinned varieties slice and eat perfectly well unpeeled, so treat this step as optional unless the skins are tough or you want the softer texture.
- One-third inchAbout 8 mm, thick enough to hold together on a plate. A serrated or very sharp thin-bladed knife works better here than a heavy chef's knife, which crushes as much as it cuts.
- Cut across, not through the coreSlicing crosswise from the stem end gives rounds that hold their shape. Core out the pale stem scar first; blanching does not soften it.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; three medium tomatoes will serve about four as a side salad. Sliced tomatoes of this kind were commonly served on lettuce with a dressing, which is best added at the last moment so the slices do not shed juice.
Cooked tomatoes were the American norm for much of the nineteenth century ed or scalloped as often as not though raw sliced tomatoes with vinegar or sugar appear in cookbooks well before 1896, and older suspicions about the fruit's wholesomeness lingered in print long after they had stopped governing practice. Farmer's instruction to skin, chill and slice belongs to the turn-of-the-century vogue for cold vegetable salads served on lettuce with a dressing. The blanch-and-peel step reflects the period's general distrust of skins and seeds in raw food, a habit that also produced peeled cucumbers on the same salad plates.