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Tomato and Cucumber Salad
Arrange alternate slices of tomato and cucumber until six slices have been piled one on top of another. Place on lettuce leaves, garnish with strips of red and green peppers. Serve with French and Mayonnaise Dressing. Remove seeds from peppers and parboil two minutes before using.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and the instructions assume you already know Fannie Farmer's dressing recipes earlier in the chapter. A few points make it work on a modern plate.
- Drain the slicesCut tomatoes and cucumbers about a quarter inch thick, salt them lightly and let them sit on a rack or paper towel for 10 minutes before stacking. Without this the stack slides apart and the dressing pools into water at the base of the plate.
- "French and Mayonnaise Dressing"Not a single bottled product but the book's two separate dressings: a plain oil-and-vinegar French dressing and a hand-beaten egg mayonnaise. The recipe does not say how the two were combined; one common reading is to dress the vegetables with the French dressing and spoon a little mayonnaise over the top as a finish.
- Parboiling the peppersThe recipe does not say why the strips are boiled for two minutes; softening the skin and taking the edge off the raw flavour are both plausible aims. Modern bell peppers are sweet raw, so blanch only if you want the strips pliable enough to lie flat, then chill them in cold water so they keep their colour.
- CucumbersThe book elsewhere advises paring cucumbers and letting them stand in ice water before use, though it does not say why. English or Persian cucumbers need neither peeling nor soaking.
- Serve cold, assemble lateChill everything, but build the stacks no more than a few minutes before they go to the table. A tomato tower that has stood in the refrigerator collapses.
- YieldThe stack is six slices in all, alternating tomato and cucumber, making one individual serving. Reckon on about three slices of each per person.
Salad occupies a whole chapter in Fannie Farmer's 1896 book, and its prominence is usually linked to improved supply — refrigerated rail cars and commercial greenhouse growing put tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce on Northern tables outside the summer months — and to cookery schools promoting raw vegetables as healthful. The style here reads as the period's presentation ambitions rather than everyday home cooking: food arranged upright, garnished with contrasting colour, served on a lettuce leaf as an edible doily. Tomatoes had by this point been widely eaten in America for decades, and the Boston Cooking School treats them as a plain ingredient needing no defence. The double dressing — vinaigrette beneath, mayonnaise above — is often described as a genteel touch of the era, and the instruction to parboil pepper strips suggests the sweet bell pepper was then a less familiar vegetable than the one sold today.