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Tomato and Cucumber Salad
Cover the bottom of a salad-dish with lettuce, place a layer of sliced cucumbers on the top, cover with a layer of slices of peeled tomatoes, pour over salad-dressing or mayonnaise sauce, and serve.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and the whole thing rests on the vegetables being cold, dry and cut just before service. Oscar gives no quantities, so treat the proportions as a matter of the dish you build it in.
- YieldOscar gives no quantities; built in one shallow bowl and portioned at the table it would plausibly serve four to six. For individual plates, use two or three lettuce leaves as a cup per person and shingle three cucumber slices and three tomato slices into each.
- Peeled tomatoesThe instruction is not decorative. Drop ripe tomatoes into boiling water for 15-30 seconds, then into ice water, and the skins slip off. Peeled slices absorb dressing instead of shedding it.
- CucumbersPeriod cucumbers tended to be thick-skinned and seedy, and nineteenth-century cookbooks commonly direct that they be pared, and sometimes salted and drained before dressing. A modern thin-skinned English or Persian cucumber needs neither; slice it thin and leave the skin for colour.
- DrainingSalt the tomato slices lightly and let them sit on a rack or paper for ten minutes before assembling. Otherwise the released juice thins the dressing into a pink puddle at the bottom of the dish.
- "Salad-dressing" vs. mayonnaiseIn an 1896 hotel kitchen these were understood as two different things: mayonnaise was the thick hand-whisked emulsion, while "salad-dressing" could mean a simple oil-and-vinegar French dressing or one of the period's cooked/boiled dressings. Oscar offers the choice; the vinaigrette suits the tomatoes better, the mayonnaise makes it a heavier course.
- Raw egg in the mayonnaiseIf you make mayonnaise from scratch for a salad that will sit out, use pasteurised eggs, and keep the finished dish refrigerated until it goes to the table.
- Dress at the last momentPour the dressing over as the dish leaves the kitchen. Lettuce under a wet layer of tomato collapses within a few minutes, and the layered structure is the only thing distinguishing this from a chopped salad.
- LettuceAssume a crisp head lettuce — iceberg or romaine hearts. Soft leaf lettuces will not hold up under the weight of the sliced vegetables and the dressing.
Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896; tomatoes in particular had only settled into general acceptance as an eating vegetable over the preceding few decades. The layered construction here — lettuce foundation, cucumber, tomato, dressing poured over at the end — suggests a salad arranged and presented rather than tossed, with the kitchen's skill showing in the knife work and the dressing. Oscar was the maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf rather than its chef, and the book reads like a house reference: hundreds of terse entries assuming a trained brigade who needed the composition, not the method. The same hotel and the same era gave us the Waldorf salad, and this tomato-and-cucumber arrangement belongs to that moment when the salad course was becoming a fixed part of the American menu.