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Tomato and Horseradish Salad (Peel and chill tomatoes cut)
Peel and chill tomatoes, cut in halves crosswise, arrange on lettuce leaves, and garnish with Horseradish Sauce I.
A three-line assembly recipe that depends entirely on two things the original leaves unsaid: how cold the tomatoes are and what goes into the sauce.
- The hinge: don't over-chillRefrigeration much below about 50F flattens tomato flavor and can turn the flesh mealy, and prolonged cold storage does lasting damage. Chill peeled tomatoes an hour at most, or hold them at cool room temperature and chill only the sauce.
- PeelingDrop the tomato into boiling water for 15-30 seconds, then into ice water; the skin slips off. Scoring the blossom end first helps.
- Horseradish Sauce IThe cross-reference is to the sauce chapter of the same book; a cold sauce of stiffly whipped heavy cream folded with grated horseradish, salt and a little vinegar or lemon is what is wanted here. Check the sauce chapter before assuming. Fold the horseradish in at the last minute or the acid will loosen the cream.
- Horseradish itselfFresh root grated on a microplane is far hotter and cleaner-tasting than jarred; jarred prepared horseradish is already in vinegar, so cut back the added acid and drain it first. Grated root loses its heat within an hour of exposure to air.
- Cut in halves crosswiseEquator cut, not stem-to-blossom. It exposes the seed chambers and gives a flat base that sits on the lettuce without rolling. Salt the cut faces lightly and let them drain a few minutes on a rack so the sauce is not thinned by tomato water.
- LettuceThe recipe says only 'lettuce leaves'. Soft-headed butter or Bibb leaves, washed and dried thoroughly, suit the dish best.
- YieldOne medium tomato per person, giving two halves. A half cup of cream whipped makes enough sauce for four to six servings.
Fannie Merritt Farmer's salad chapter belongs to a moment when eating the tomato raw and unadorned still felt worth a printed instruction. The salads of the 1896 book and its later editions are largely compositions rather than cooked dishes: something chilled, arranged on a lettuce leaf, and finished with a dressing carried over by cross-reference from another chapter, which is why so many of them run to a single sentence. Horseradish, grated into whipped cream, is often said to have been a cold accompaniment to boiled beef and to oysters in the same period, and turning it toward a vegetable is characteristic of the school's habit of recombining a fixed set of sauces across the whole book. The result is more a serving suggestion than a recipe, and it reflects the Boston Cooking-School method: teach the components once, then assume the reader can be trusted to assemble them.