Tomato Salad
One firm tomato should be allowed for each person; scald, skin and chill them, remove the centers with a spoon and fill each with water cress, diced cucumbers and olives; mix with a French dressing. Serve each on a lettuce leaf with mayonnaise.
A stuffed raw tomato, and the whole thing rests on the tomato itself: it must be firm enough to hold its shape after skinning and hollowing. A soft late-summer slicer will collapse the moment you scoop it.
- Scalding and skinningCut a shallow X in the blossom end, drop the tomatoes into boiling water for 15 to 30 seconds, then straight into ice water. The skin slips off in sheets. Longer than half a minute and the flesh beneath begins to cook and go slack.
- Hollowing and drainingAfter removing the centers, salt the insides lightly and invert the shells on a rack for 15 to 20 minutes. The book does not say to, but skinned tomatoes weep, and undrained shells will thin the dressing into a puddle on the plate.
- French dressing in 1900French dressing -- At this period this generally means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar; some versions also add mustard, paprika or a little lemon. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name in America.
- Water cressWatercress here is the peppery bunching kind sold with stems attached, not mâche or microgreens. Use the leaves and the tender upper stems, chopped coarsely; the thick lower stems are stringy.
- Chill orderChill the skinned shells and the cut filling separately and combine with the dressing only just before serving. Cucumber dressed in advance goes limp and releases water.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise was made fresh from raw yolks. If you make your own, use pasteurized eggs, or use a good jarred mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of lemon juice, which behaves much the same on the plate.
- YieldOne tomato per person, as stated. The recipe gives no quantities for the filling; scale the cucumber, cress and olives to the number of hollowed shells you have and stop when they are full.
Stuffed raw tomato salads appear across American cookbooks from the 1890s onward, and they mark a fairly recent shift in how tomatoes were eaten. Through much of the nineteenth century the fruit was cooked at length, with some recipes calling for an hour or more, a practice often traced to lingering suspicion of the nightshade family and partly explained by the coarseness of early varieties. By the turn of the century the tomato was firmly a salad vegetable, and the hollowed-and-filled version is often said to have been a fixture of the ladies' luncheon table, where individually composed salads served on a lettuce leaf were reportedly the expected form. The reliance on a separate French dressing for the filling and mayonnaise for the plate is typical of the period's salad chapters, which treated the two as distinct and complementary rather than interchangeable.