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Delicious and Pretty Salad
To make a delicious and pretty salad, cut a thin slice from the stem end of a large round tomato, take out the pulp, season it with a few drops of onion juice and finely chopped sweet, green pepper, olives and celery; fill each tomato with the mixture, put a teaspoonful of stiff mayonnaise on each; decorate the mayonnaise with two or three thin strips of olives placed skin side up. Set each tomato on a crisp lettuce leaf.
A stuffed tomato salad that stands or falls on the firmness of the tomato and the stiffness of the mayonnaise. Everything else is knife work.
- Choose the tomato firstUse firm, slightly underripe round tomatoes about 3 inches across; a dead-ripe one collapses once hollowed. Salt the inside lightly and invert on a rack for 15-20 minutes to drain, or the filling will sit in a pool of juice.
- Onion juiceA period ingredient made by halving an onion and pressing it against a grater or reamer to express juice without pulp. A few drops means just that — about 1/4 teaspoon for four tomatoes. Grated onion squeezed through a fine sieve gives the same result.
- Sweet green pepperAn ordinary green bell pepper, seeded and cut in a fine dice. The recipe is right to keep it fine — coarse pieces overwhelm the tomato.
- The olivesProbably brined olives, pitted; the recipe does not say which kind. Chop some into the filling and cut the rest into thin lengthwise strips for the top; "skin side up" most likely means the smooth outer surface faces out so the strips keep a clean line.
- Stiff mayonnaiseThe mayonnaise must hold a shape on top of the tomato. Homemade with a full ratio of oil to yolk, or a thick commercial mayonnaise, both work; a thin dressing slides off. If yours is loose, chill it hard before spooning.
- Assemble lateFill and decorate no more than an hour before serving and keep chilled. Held longer, the tomato weeps and the lettuce under it goes limp.
- YieldOne tomato per person as a first course or luncheon salad; the quantities scale directly.
Stuffed-tomato salads were everywhere in American cookbooks between about 1890 and 1930, and they say a good deal about how salad was understood then: not a tossed bowl but a composed, individually plated arrangement, judged as much on appearance as on flavor — hence "pretty" in the title and the fussy instruction to lay the olive strips skin side up. The lettuce leaf beneath is the standard base of the era, apparently common to a great many such recipes, and it functioned as much as a doily as a vegetable. Mayonnaise was the dressing of choice for these set-piece salads because it held its shape for the trip from kitchen to table. Onion juice, now largely forgotten, appears constantly in books of this period as a way to get onion flavor into a delicate cold dish without visible pieces.