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Tomato Surprise Salad
6 tomatoes
¼ cup mayonnaise dressing
¾ cup diced cucumber
Lettuce
½ cup diced, cooked chicken
Garnish of truffles or walnut- ¼ cup chopped nuts meats
Select medium-sized, smooth tomatoes. Scald and remove the skins. Chill. Carefully scoop the inside out of the tomatoes. Remove the seeds from the pulp. Chill all ingredients, and when ready to serve, mix the chicken, cucumber, tomato pulp, and nuts with the mayonnaise dressing. Add more salt if needed. Fill the tomatoes.
Arrange on lettuce leaves. Garnish with mayonnaise and decorate each tomato top with a slice of truffle or with halves of shelled nuts.
A stuffed-tomato salad of the sort that filled luncheon menus in the 1920s. Nothing here is difficult, but the result stands or falls on temperature and on draining.
- YieldSix tomatoes, one per person, as a first course or a light lunch plate. The filling quantities are tight — expect just enough, with nothing left over.
- Skinning the tomatoes"Scald" means dip in boiling water 15–30 seconds, until the skin splits, then straight into ice water. Longer and the outer flesh cooks and the shell slumps when you hollow it.
- Drain the shellsThe instruction the recipe skips. After scooping, salt the inside of each shell lightly and stand them upside down on a rack for 20 minutes. Otherwise the tomato water thins the mayonnaise into a puddle on the lettuce.
- Handling the pulpRemoving seeds from the pulp is easiest through a coarse sieve; press the pulp against the mesh and discard the seeds and gel. Then let the pulp drain as well — wet pulp is the main cause of a soupy filling.
- ChickenPoached or roasted breast, cut in ¼-inch dice. Half a cup is roughly 2½ to 3 ounces of cooked meat.
- NutsUnspecified in the original; walnuts are implied by the garnish of walnut-meats. Toast them briefly and add at the last moment so they stay crisp.
- TrufflesA canned or bottled black truffle sliced thin was a standard garnish of the period. A thin slice of black olive gives the same dark disc against the red if you would rather not buy one.
- Assemble to orderMix and fill only when the plates are going out. Held even half an hour, the salt draws liquid from the cucumber and the filling breaks.
The stuffed tomato was one of the defining forms of the American "salad course" roughly between the 1890s and the 1930s, when salad meant an arranged, composed plate rather than tossed leaves, not an ingredient. Butterick was a pattern company publishing for home sewers and housekeepers, and the dish shows the same care of presentation, right down to the single slice of truffle on top. The "surprise" is presumably that the tomato turns out to be full. Chicken salad bound with mayonnaise was a common luncheon dish of the era, and this recipe is a thrifty use of it, stretching half a cup of cooked chicken across six servings with cucumber, tomato pulp and nuts.