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Tomato and Cucumber Salad
Peel four good-sized tomatoes, set in a cold place, and slice when needed. Peel two small cucumbers, and slice them very thin. Make a bed of lettuce in a salad bowl, and lay upon it the tomatoes, and then the sliced cucumbers. Cut two small onions into thin slices, and add them, and also, if possible, four tarragon leaves. Pour over all a French dressing, and serve at once.
A straightforward composed salad from the Butterick book's salad chapter. The only real technique is restraint: everything is dressed at the last moment.
- Dress at the tableTomatoes and cucumbers both weep once salt and acid touch them. The instruction to "serve at once" is the hinge of the recipe — assemble the bowl, pour the dressing, carry it in.
- French dressingIn this period that means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name in the United States today.
- Cucumbers"Two small cucumbers" would most likely have been thick-skinned, seedy field cucumbers, which would explain the instruction to peel. English or Persian cucumbers need no peeling and can be sliced on a mandoline for the "very thin" the recipe asks for.
- OnionsTwo small onions raw is assertive by modern taste. Sweet, red or spring onions suit better, and a ten-minute soak in cold water takes the bite out of a strong one.
- TarragonFour fresh leaves, torn rather than chopped; tarragon is anise-scented and dominates quickly. Dried tarragon works less well here if you want the leaves to show in the bowl.
- Chilling the tomatoes"Set in a cold place" meant a cellar or icebox. Cold blunts tomato flavour, so refrigerate only briefly if at all; peeled tomatoes hold their shape well enough for an hour on a cool counter.
- YieldFour tomatoes and two cucumbers serve about four as a side salad, six if the lettuce bed is generous.
Salad chapters expanded in American cookbooks around 1900, and this one reflects that: raw tomatoes are here treated as ordinary summer fare, and the dressing is called "French" as a matter of course. The Butterick Publishing Company was a pattern and magazine house — the same firm behind The Delineator — and its cook book was aimed at the middle-class housekeeper who wanted her table to look current. A layered bowl on a bed of lettuce, dressed at the last second and finished with four counted tarragon leaves, is a small piece of that ambition: the ingredients are from the kitchen garden, but the presentation is borrowed from the restaurant.