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Tomato and Watercress Salad
Peel and chill large tomatoes, cut in slices one-third inch thick, and slices in strips one-third inch wide. Arrange on a flat dish to represent lattice work, and fill in the spaces with watercress. Serve with French Dressing.
A composed salad with almost no cooking to it, so the whole thing turns on tomato quality and cold. A few notes on the technique the original assumes you already know.
- Peeling the tomatoesPeriod practice was to loosen the skin by dipping the tomato briefly in boiling water and slipping it off, then chilling it thoroughly; some writers preferred to skin salad tomatoes without scalding to keep them firm. Skip the blanching if your tomatoes are thin-skinned; a tough skin ruins the clean lattice edge.
- Chill orderThe instruction says peel first, then chill, and it matters. Warm, freshly blanched tomatoes are soft and will not cut into neat one-third-inch strips until they have been well chilled.
- Cutting the stripsSlice across the equator, not from stem to blossom, and lay the slices flat before cutting into strips. Scoop out the loosest seed jelly or the lattice will slide apart on the plate.
- French DressingIn this book that means a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing with salt and pepper, in the region of two parts oil to one of vinegar (paprika appears in some variants), beaten or shaken together before serving. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name in the United States today.
- Dress at the tableVinegar draws water out of cut tomato within minutes and washes the lattice flat. Pass the dressing separately or spoon it over just before it goes out.
- WatercressUse the leaves and tender upper stems only, washed in several changes of cold water and dried well. Wet cress dilutes the dressing and makes the plate weep.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. Three or four large tomatoes and a bunch of cress will roughly fill a flat dish for a side salad.
This is a period showpiece rather than a dish: the lattice arrangement belongs to the era of the composed salad, when a salad's job at a formal luncheon or supper was to look constructed. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is of that school, its salad entries assuming a cook with time and a flat serving dish. Watercress was widely available in American markets through the late nineteenth century, grown in running water near cities and sold in bunches, and it functioned as both garnish and salad green. The pairing with tomato is simply good sense — peppery green against sweet acid — but the lattice is pure table decoration, and it tells you the salad course was expected to be looked at before it was eaten.