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Tomatoes with Celery
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 a 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-tomato salad of the sort that filled the cold course at Edwardian luncheons. The recipe assumes you know how to make mayonnaise and how to hollow a tomato without wrecking it; everything else is left to judgment.
- Drain the shells firstThe hinge of the dish. After scooping, salt the insides lightly and invert them on a rack or paper towels for 20 to 30 minutes. Skipping this gives you a pool of watery liquid that thins the dressing within minutes of assembly.
- Choose the right tomatoFirm, thick-walled and round — a beefsteak or a large plum type holds its walls. Very ripe heirlooms collapse when hollowed. Cut a thin slice from the top, as the recipe directs, and use a teaspoon or melon baller to work around the seed cavities.
- Celery diceCut into roughly quarter-inch dice from the inner, paler ribs; the outer stalks are stringy and should be peeled with a vegetable peeler first. Figure about one cup of diced celery for four medium tomatoes.
- The dressingA period mayonnaise is raw yolk, oil, vinegar or lemon and salt, made by hand and used the same day. If you make your own, use pasteurized eggs; otherwise good bottled mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of lemon juice is closer to the original texture than most people expect.
- Chill, but not too longFill no more than an hour before serving and keep refrigerated. Filled overnight, the celery leaches water and the dressing thins and slackens.
- ServingOne tomato per person as a salad course; the recipe gives no yield. The lettuce is a bed, not a garnish — small inner leaves of butterhead or the heart of a romaine hold their shape under the tomato better than loose leaf.
Stuffed raw tomatoes were a fixture of American salad chapters from the 1890s through the 1920s, arriving alongside the wider acceptance of the tomato as something to be eaten uncooked. Earlier nineteenth-century cooks more often stewed or baked them, frequently for long periods; the raw tomato salad depended on both better market supply and the spread of mayonnaise, which by the time of the Butterick book was one of the standard dressings for salads served on lettuce, alongside boiled and French dressings. The pairing with celery suits the period's taste for crispness and pale colors on the plate, and celery still carried some cachet, sold upright in cut-glass celery vases at the table. Butterick, a pattern and magazine company, published its cook book for broadly the same readership it sold dress patterns to — households aspiring to serve courses "individually," plated in the kitchen rather than passed at table, which is what the closing instruction here describes.