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Tomato Salad in Surprise
Peel a nice large tomato and empty its contents; then take some cold slaw and celery hashed up very fine and mix it with mayonnaise dressing, add a pinch of salt and a pinch of paprika pepper. Mix it well and fill the tomato with this mixture. The tomato must be served very cold so as to have this salad a success. Use one tomato for each guest.
A four-line recipe that depends almost entirely on temperature and on how finely the filling is cut. Both are easy to get wrong.
- Serve it genuinely coldOscar says so explicitly, and he means it: the shell should be refrigerated until it is cold to the touch, and the filling chilled separately, then combined shortly before serving. A tomato held at room temperature goes slack and weeps, and the mayonnaise loosens into the shell.
- "Cold slaw"A common nineteenth-century form of "cole slaw", reinterpreted as "cold"; the term comes from Dutch koolsla (kool, cabbage + sla, salad). Here it probably means raw white cabbage shredded very fine — not the sweet, heavily dressed deli salad. If you start with dressed slaw, drain it hard first or the filling will be watery.
- Hashed up very fineThe cabbage and celery want to be nearly minced, closer to a fine relish than a slaw. Coarse shreds will not sit in a hollowed tomato and the salad eats awkwardly with a fork.
- Peeling the tomatoCut a shallow cross in the skin and dip it in boiling water for 10 to 15 seconds, then into ice water; the skin slips off without softening the flesh. A serrated peeler works on a very firm tomato but tends to gouge.
- Empty and drain the shellCut off the stem end, scoop out seeds and pulp, then salt the inside lightly and invert on a rack for 15 to 20 minutes. This draws out the juice that would otherwise thin the dressing.
- The mayonnaiseA hotel kitchen of this period would have made it fresh with raw yolks. Nothing in this dish is cooked, so if you are making mayonnaise from scratch for anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs; good jarred mayonnaise is a fair substitute here.
- PaprikaAt the time this would have meant sweet paprika, largely Hungarian in origin, used as much for color as for heat. Modern smoked paprika is a different seasoning entirely and will dominate the dish.
- Yield and serviceOne tomato per person, as the recipe directs, set on a leaf of crisp lettuce or a bed of cracked ice.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, made his name partly on salads, and this is a small specimen of the genre that also produced the Waldorf salad itself: raw vegetables, a bound dressing, and a bit of theater in the presentation. The "surprise" is simply that the tomato looks whole and turns out to be full of something else — a conceit found in late-Victorian and Edwardian menu writing, where dishes en surprise concealed one thing inside another. Stuffed raw tomatoes belong to the composed-salad fashion of the period, and a cold salad course depended on a kitchen with dependable ice — which may be why Oscar is so insistent that the tomato be served very cold.