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Tropical Salad
1 cup cantaloup balls
Any desired dressing
6 slices tomato
Lettuce leaves
Garnish of red pepper
With a vegetable cutter, cut small balls from a cantaloup that is fairly firm in texture. Arrange several balls on a slice of tomato which has been placed on a nest of lettuce leaves. Garnish with pieces of red pepper or green pepper cut in diamond shapes. Serve with any desired dressing.
An assembly recipe rather than a cooked one, so the only real decisions are ripeness, tool and dressing.
- "Cantaloup"The spelling is period; the melon is the same one sold today as cantaloupe or muskmelon. "Fairly firm in texture" is the operative phrase — a dead-ripe melon will collapse under the cutter and weep onto the lettuce.
- Vegetable cutterThis is a melon baller (a Parisienne scoop). A 1-inch scoop gives balls in scale with a tomato slice; the small end of a double baller is fussier but looks neater against the diamonds of pepper.
- Red pepperSweet red capsicum, not chile and not cayenne. Cut the diamonds from a flat panel of pepper with the ribs shaved off so they lie flush.
- Tomato slicesCut about 1/2 inch thick from a firm tomato, from the equator rather than the stem end, so the slice holds a full round shape under the melon. Salting the slices and draining them briefly on a towel keeps the plate from flooding.
- "Any desired dressing"In an American book of this period this means a vinaigrette ("French dressing") or a boiled or mayonnaise-type dressing. Melon and tomato both carry acid well, so a sharp lemon vinaigrette suits the pairing better than a sweet cooked dressing.
- YieldOne cup of balls across six tomato slices gives six individual salads, three or four balls each — a first course or a luncheon side rather than a main salad.
- TimingAssemble within an hour of serving and keep chilled. Scooped melon loses structure as it sits, and the lettuce nest wilts under the weight once the dressing goes on.
Fruit-and-vegetable salads arranged in a "nest" of lettuce were a hallmark of American home cooking in the first decades of the twentieth century, when salad shifted from a dressed pile of greens to a composed, plated set-piece. Cheap manufactured gadgets are part of the story: the vegetable or Parisienne cutter that turns melon into uniform spheres was exactly the sort of inexpensive tool the household magazines of the era promoted. Butterick, a pattern company that published The Delineator and sold dress patterns to the same readers it sold cookbooks to, dealt in this idiom of neat, repeatable prettiness — hence the diamond-cut pepper garnish, which does nothing for the flavor and everything for the look of the plate. Why the combination is called "tropical" is not explained; the word was used loosely at the table in this period for dishes involving melon or fruit, and both cantaloupe and tomato were commonplace American market produce by the time this was printed.