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Lettuce and Tomato Salad
Take a white head of lettuce, pare off the outer green leaves, core, wash and drain in a wire-basket, then split and cut the leaves into quarters and put them in a bowl. Have tomatoes, cut in thin slices, and place over the lettuce. Season as follows: Mix one pinch of salt and one-half pinch of pepper in two tablespoonfuls of vinegar, add one and one-half tablespoonfuls of oil, pour over the salad, and serve.
A plain dressed salad from the Waldorf's kitchen, written for cooks who already knew what a good vinaigrette looked like. The proportions are the only thing that will surprise a modern reader.
- The dressing ratioTwo tablespoons vinegar to one and a half of oil is more acidic than the three-to-one oil-to-vinegar often given today. It suits iceberg and firm tomatoes, but taste it before pouring; you may prefer to even the proportions out or reverse them.
- "A pinch"An unstandardised measure: roughly what fits between thumb and fingers, usually reckoned today at somewhere between 1/16 and 1/8 teaspoon. Half a pinch of pepper is a scant grind or two.
- A white head of lettuceMost likely a tightly packed crisphead of the sort that led to modern iceberg, chosen for its pale, crunchy heart. Romaine hearts work; loose-leaf and butterhead are softer and stand up less well to an acidic dressing.
- Coring and drainingWhack the stem end against the counter and twist the core out. The wire basket is a salad spinner's forerunner: the leaves must be dry or the dressing slides off and pools.
- Which oil, which vinegarThe recipe does not specify; olive oil with a cider or wine vinegar is the likeliest reading. Malt vinegar is too aggressive here; plain distilled vinegar is harsher still.
- Order of assemblyDress at the table or immediately before serving. Salted tomatoes weep quickly and the released juice thins the vinaigrette into water.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield or number of tomatoes. One head of lettuce with two or three tomatoes and this quantity of dressing would make roughly four side servings.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, later the Waldorf-Astoria, from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book is enormous — some 900 pages of everything a large hotel kitchen might be asked for, from turtle soup to this. Salads of raw lettuce and sliced tomato were still a relatively recent fixture on American tables; tomatoes had only shed the last of their suspect reputation in the mid-nineteenth century, and it was hotel and restaurant cooking that helped normalise them uncooked. The book's real interest is that it records the house baseline rather than the showpieces: a dressing mixed in the bowl, no mustard, no garlic, no emulsion, just salt, pepper, vinegar and oil in that order. The same volume contains the Waldorf salad of apple, celery and mayonnaise that made Oscar's name, though he is generally credited with the dish rather than documented as its inventor.