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Wiersbick's Salad
Peel small tomatoes of uniform size and scoop out a portion of centres. Arrange in nests of lettuce leaves and garnish top of each with a slice of cucumber, slice of truffle cut in fancy shape, and ring of green pepper. Serve with the following dressing:
Mix three tablespoons Louit Frères mustard, one-fourth teaspoon salt, one-eighth teaspoon paprika, one tablespoon vinegar, and one-half teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce; then add slowly, while stirring constantly, one-half cup olive oil.
A composed salad of the sort that dominated American hotel and club cookery around 1900: peeled tomatoes, a hollowed centre, and a garnish arranged for the eye. The only real work is the dressing, which is a small mustard emulsion.
- The hinge: add the oil slowlyHalf a cup of oil into three tablespoons of mustard and one of vinegar is a high oil ratio, and the mustard is doing all the emulsifying. Add it a few drops at a time at the start, whisking hard, or the dressing will break.
- Louit Frères mustardLouit Freres mustard -- A Bordeaux firm whose jars were imported into the United States at the time. It would have been a Bordeaux-style prepared mustard, generally milder than Dijon; a good Dijon is the closest substitute, though it will be sharper, so taste before adding the salt.
- Peeling the tomatoesNo method is given. Score the skins, drop them in boiling water for 10-15 seconds and into ice water, and the skins slip off. Use firm tomatoes so they hold their shape once hollowed.
- TruffleFresh black truffle is out of reach for most kitchens now, and the tinned "truffle" of the period was often preserved black truffle sliced thin for decoration. A thin slice of black olive gives the same dark accent; truffle oil in a dressing this mustard-heavy is wasted.
- Green pepper ringCut a crosswise slice about 1/8 inch thick from the middle of a green bell pepper and remove the seeds and ribs. It sits flat over the cucumber slice.
- Scooping the centresRemove seeds and pulp with a small spoon or melon baller, salt the cavities lightly and invert them on a rack for ten minutes so they drain. Otherwise the water thins the dressing on the plate.
- Yield and servingThe dressing makes roughly three-quarters of a cup, enough for perhaps six to eight tomatoes. Assemble the salads no more than a half hour ahead and keep them cold; dress at the table or spoon over just before serving.
Named salads like this one were the small change of turn-of-the-century professional cookery: such names are often said to have come from a chef, a steward or a favoured patron who got a garnish combination attached to his name, though the origin of this particular name is unrecorded. The arrangement travelled between hotel kitchens and into printed collections. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book absorbed a good many of them, and the salad chapter in particular reads as a catalogue of composed plates meant to be looked at as much as eaten. The two markers of expense here are the truffle and the branded French mustard. Louit Frères was a Bordeaux firm whose mustard was imported and advertised in the United States in this period, and calling for it by name rather than saying "French mustard" tells you the jar was expected to be on the shelf of the kind of household that owned this book. Peeled raw tomatoes were themselves still a slightly refined thing to serve.