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Hot Weather Salads
A refreshing salad is made of a mixture of tomatoes, chopped cabbage, green peppers and olives, seasoned with salt and filled into the shells of tomatoes from which the pulp has been removed. A generous allowance of mayonnaise is placed on the top of each, and then served on a bed of lettuce leaves.
A stuffed-tomato salad written in the shorthand of its era: no quantities, no timings, and an assumption that the cook already knows how to hollow a tomato and whip up mayonnaise. The proportions are yours to set, but a few details decide whether it holds together on the plate.
- The hinge: drain the shellsCut the tops from firm tomatoes, scoop the pulp, salt the insides lightly and stand them upside down on a rack for 15-20 minutes. Skipping this gives you a shell that weeps into the lettuce within minutes of serving.
- Working proportionsThe original gives no quantities. As a starting point, for four tomatoes try about a cup of finely shredded cabbage, half of the reserved tomato pulp with seeds and juice discarded, one small green pepper diced fine, and 8-10 olives chopped, adjusting to taste.
- Green peppersIn period usage this ordinarily means an unripe sweet bell pepper. Core, seed and remove the white ribs, and dice small enough that no single piece dominates a spoonful.
- OlivesBrine-cured green olives, often sold unpitted, were the common sort; if yours have pits, pit and chop them yourself. Modern canned black olives are milder and blander; a brine-cured green olive such as Manzanilla gives a sharper result.
- MayonnaiseThe "generous allowance" would in this period have been made at home by hand from raw yolk and oil. Good jarred mayonnaise works; if you make your own to serve uncooked, use pasteurized eggs and keep the salad refrigerated until it goes to the table.
- SeasoningSalt alone is thin by current taste. A spoonful of lemon juice or mild vinegar over the cabbage mixture before filling brightens it considerably and keeps the cabbage from tasting raw.
- Serve cold, assemble lateChill the shells and the filling separately and combine no more than half an hour before serving. Cabbage sheds water once salted and dressed.
- YieldOne filled tomato per person as a first course or luncheon salad; two makes a light meal.
Stuffed tomatoes were a fixture of American summer cookery in this period, when the tomato had become the emblem of hot-weather eating. Cookbooks of the period grouped such dishes under headings like this one because summer meals were expected to be cold by design: the coal range was punishing to light in July, and salads, cold meats and jellied dishes carried the household through. The mayonnaise crowning each tomato is the giveaway of the era's taste — commercially bottled mayonnaise was not yet a fixture of American kitchens, so a "generous allowance" meant a cook who had stood over a bowl with oil and a fork. The combination of cabbage with tomato and pepper also reflects how much of the salad course still leaned on sturdy keeping vegetables rather than tender greens, with lettuce used chiefly as the bed underneath.