Tomato Salad
Take the skin, juice, and seeds from nice, fresh tomatoes, chop what remains with celery, and add a good salad-dressing.
A three-line recipe that assumes you know what a Southern salad dressing of the 1880s looked like. The real work is in the tomatoes.
- PeelingScore the blossom end and drop the tomatoes in boiling water for 15-30 seconds, then into ice water; the skins slip off. Firm, meaty tomatoes hold up far better here than juicy slicers, since the recipe discards the juice entirely.
- "Take the juice and seeds"Quarter the peeled tomatoes and scrape out the seed pockets with a thumb or a small spoon. What remains is the wall of the fruit, chopped into dice. This is what keeps the salad from watering down the dressing.
- SaltingAfter chopping, a light salting in a colander for 20 minutes and a gentle press draws out more moisture. The book does not mention it, but it is the difference between salad and soup.
- CeleryUse the inner ribs, sliced thin across, at roughly equal volume to the tomato or a little less. Older recipes often called for celery blanched pale in the garden; supermarket celery is stronger and benefits from being cut fine.
- "A good salad-dressing"In cookbooks of this period that usually means a boiled or cooked dressing thickened with egg and mustard, or a plain oil-and-vinegar French dressing. Either works; mayonnaise makes a heavier, more modern-tasting version.
- Proportions and yieldFour medium tomatoes and three or four celery ribs, with about a third of a cup of dressing, serves four as a side. Dress it just before serving, as tomatoes continue to weep once salted and sauced.
- ServingCookbooks of the period often suggest serving such a salad cold on crisp lettuce leaves rather than in a bowl; its position in the meal varied.
Tomato salads appear late in the American recipe record because the tomato itself was slow to gain trust; it is often said to have been grown chiefly as an ornamental in its earlier American career, though tomatoes were being eaten and marketed in America from the 1830s and 1840s onward. By the time The Dixie Cook-Book was compiled, the tomato was abundant enough to be treated casually, and the salads chapter of such books reflects a newer fashion for cold dressed vegetables at table, a style generally traced to French service. The instruction to discard skin, juice and seeds is characteristic of the period's fastidiousness about texture: seeds and skins were thought coarse, and much of the era's tomato cookery consists of straining, sieving and peeling away everything but the flesh.