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Tomato and Celery Salad
6 tomatoes
⅓ to ½ cup mayonnaise
2 cups celery, diced
Lettuce leaves
Select firm tomatoes of a good size, cut a slice from the top of each, and scoop out all the seeds and soft pulp, being careful not to break the sides. Cut celery into small dice, mix it with mayonnaise dressing, fill the shells with the mixture, place one teaspoon of the dressing on top of each tomato and serve individually on a bed of lettuce leaves, placing three or four small leaves on each plate and the tomato in the center.
A stuffed raw tomato needs almost no adaptation, but a few details decide whether it holds its shape on the plate.
- Tomato choiceFirm, thick-walled tomatoes hollow out cleanly; very ripe or thin-walled fruit with large seed cavities is more likely to collapse. Round, dense slicing tomatoes about 3 inches across are a safe choice.
- Drain the shellsAfter scooping, salt the insides lightly and invert them on a rack for 15-20 minutes. The original skips this, but it removes the water that otherwise thins the dressing into a puddle.
- CeleryTwo cups of small dice is roughly four to five medium stalks, or rather more if you use only the small inner ribs. The pale heart is worth using here, as the outer ribs are stringy raw and should be peeled with a vegetable peeler if you use them.
- Mayonnaise quantityA third to a half cup is generous for two cups of celery; start with a third, fold it in, and add more only if the dice look dry. Too much and the filling slumps out of the shell.
- The book's mayonnaiseMayonnaise of this period was generally stiffer and more sharply acidulated than most jarred versions, closer to a firm homemade emulsion. If using commercial mayonnaise, you may want to sharpen it with lemon juice and a little salt and white pepper.
- TimingFill no more than an hour ahead and keep chilled. Assembled tomatoes weep as they stand, and lettuce laid under them wilts quickly.
- YieldSix tomatoes, one per person, as a first course or a luncheon salad alongside something more substantial.
Salads of this kind — a raw vegetable hollowed out, packed with a mayonnaise-bound filling and set on a lettuce leaf — were a mainstay of the American "salad course" in the first decades of the twentieth century, when a salad was often expected to arrive at the table as a composed, individually plated object, though tossed salads coexisted with them throughout the period. Celery was a fashionable and comparatively expensive vegetable in that period, sold blanched and pale and often served on its own in tall celery glasses, so pairing it with tomatoes made a dish that read as both fresh and slightly luxurious. The Butterick company published its household books alongside its dress patterns for the same audience of middle-class homemakers, and the emphasis here on neat presentation — three or four small leaves per plate, one teaspoon of dressing on top — is characteristic: the instructions are as much about how the plate should look as about how the food should taste.