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Tomato Ciboulettes
Remove skins from four small tomatoes, and cut in halves crosswise. Cover with Mayonnaise, and sprinkle with finely chopped chives. Serve on lettuce leaves.
A three-line assembly that lives or dies on the tomatoes. Everything else is technique you already have.
- The hinge: peel without cookingDunk the tomatoes in boiling water for 10-15 seconds, then straight into ice water, and the skins slip off with the point of a knife. Any longer and the outer flesh turns soft, which ruins the clean cut face the dish depends on.
- "Ciboulettes"Simply the French word for chives; the title is describing the garnish, not a separate preparation. Use fresh chives snipped with scissors rather than chopped with a knife, which bruises them and dulls the green.
- Cut crosswise, and seasonHalving through the equator gives two flat, stable rounds. Fannie Farmer omits it, but salt the cut faces lightly and let them drain a few minutes on paper before saucing, or the mayonnaise will slide off in a watery film.
- The mayonnaiseThe book means its own hand-beaten oil-and-egg-yolk mayonnaise, thick enough to hold a shape. Bottled mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice behaves similarly. If you make your own and are serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised, use pasteurized eggs, since nothing here is cooked.
- Small tomatoes"Small" here means a tomato that halves into two neat rounds manageable with a salad fork, not a cherry tomato. Modern Campari or small vine tomatoes are the closest match; a beefsteak half is too large to eat neatly with a salad fork.
- Yield and servingFour tomatoes give eight halves, so two per person for four as a first course. Assemble no more than fifteen minutes before serving, and keep it cold: the lettuce wilts under the sauce and the tomatoes weep.
This is the salad chapter of the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book at its most characteristic: a French name, an American vegetable, and a mayonnaise doing all the work. Raw tomatoes served on a lettuce leaf were already well established by the 1890s, though the book's many separate tomato entries suggest they were still fashionable. The borrowed French label was common in the period's genteel cookery writing, where a dish called ciboulettes read better on a luncheon menu than "tomatoes with chives." Chives were more often a kitchen-garden plant than a market purchase, which may be why the recipe assumes you simply have some.