6 smooth, small-sized tomatoes. 6 tablespoonfuls of chicken, veal or tongue, cut fine. 6 tablespoonfuls of peas. 3 olives, chopped fine. 3 gherkins, chopped fine. 2 tablespoonfuls of capers. Salt and pepper. Mayonnaise dressing.
_Method._--Remove a round piece from the stem end of the tomatoes and scoop out the seeds and centre. Chill thoroughly. When ready to serve, mix together the solid part removed from the tomatoes, cut fine, and the other ingredients; season to taste with salt and pepper, adding also mayonnaise to hold the mixture together. With this fill the tomatoes, put them in nests of lettuce or cress, and force a star of mayonnaise on the top of each tomato.
Plunge the tomatoes, placed in a wire basket, into a kettle of hot water; remove at once and rub off the skin; chill thoroughly and cut in halves. Serve on lettuce leaves with a star of cream dressing, seasoned with grated horseradish, on the top of each slice.
Cook two sweetbreads as directed on another page, or braise with vegetables. Cool between two plates bearing a weight. When cold cut into slices and stamp into rounds of suitable size to use with slices of tomato. Cover the slices of sweetbread with chaud-froid sauce and decorate with fine-chopped parsley or sifted yolk of egg; pour over a little melted aspic. When the aspic is set, trim neatly, and arrange each round of sweetbread on a slice of chilled tomato. Serve inside a border of lettuce around a salad made of the trimmings of the sweetbreads and a cucumber cut in cubes and dressed with mayonnaise.
[Illustration: Cress, Cucumber, and Tomato Salad.
[Illustration: Tomato Jelly with Celery and Nuts.
Wash the cress and shake dry; arrange as a bed on a serving-dish, discarding the coarse stems; above this make a smaller bed of cucumbers, cut in slices or dice and dressed with French dressing, using three tablespoonfuls of oil and one of vinegar or lemon juice to a pint of cucumber. Arrange peeled tomatoes, chilled and cut in pieces, upon the cucumbers. Serve with French, cream or mayonnaise dressing.
Peel five tomatoes, cut off the stem ends and scoop out the pulp, thus forming cups; set, turned upside down, in a cool place. Chop fine the solid pulp from the tomatoes and one cucumber, chilled before chopping; stir into a cup of cream dressing and fill the tomatoes with the mixture. Salt and pepper will be needed in addition to that in the dressing. If at hand, a pimento may be chopped with the other ingredients, or two tablespoonfuls of grated horseradish may be used. Serve at once on lettuce leaves.