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Tomato Salad
Plunge four large or six medium-sized sound red tomatoes into boiling water for half a minute. Lift them up, peel and let get thoroughly cold. Cut into quarters, place in a salad bowl, season with four tablespoons French dressing mix well and serve.
A four-line salad whose whole quality rests on the tomatoes and on the chilling step. A few notes on the technique and the dressing.
- The blanchingHalf a minute in boiling water works for properly ripe fruit; scoring a small cross at the blossom end helps. Underripe tomatoes may not slip their skins in that time, and longer boiling starts to cook the flesh.
- Cool completely, and whyThe instruction to let them get "thoroughly cold" is the hinge. Warm tomatoes weep and turn the dressing watery; chilled ones stay firm enough to quarter cleanly. An ice-water bath straight after peeling does the job in a couple of minutes.
- French dressing in 1900French dressing -- In a book of this period this means a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled product sold under that name today. Four tablespoons is generous for four tomatoes; dress at the last moment.
- Sound tomatoes"Sound" is the period word for unblemished and unsplit. The recipe has no herbs, sugar or aromatics to hide behind, so it is only worth making in tomato season.
- Salt timingSalting the quarters and letting them sit will draw out juice and dilute the dressing. Season in the bowl immediately before serving, or salt deliberately and drain if you prefer the more concentrated result.
- YieldFour to six as a side salad, judging by the quantity of fruit. It does not keep well once dressed.
Raw tomato salads were still a relatively recent habit in English-language cookbooks of this period. The tomato had been grown ornamentally and eaten cooked, stewed or in ketchup long before it was widely trusted uncooked, and nineteenth-century American and British books often called for peeling and chilling as a matter of delicacy as much as texture. The plain peeled tomato with oil and vinegar was read as a Continental way of eating, and the name "French dressing" carries that association.