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Independence Day Salad--No. 1
Make balls of red tomato jelly by cooking the tomatoes, straining and combining it with gelatine. Serve on a blue platter or salad bowl on a bed of silvery white endive, using a French dressing.
A patriotic color exercise rather than a worked-out formula: the original gives no quantities, so the whole thing hinges on getting the gelatine ratio firm enough to hold a ball shape. Everything below fills in what the compiler assumed a cook already knew.
- Gelatine proportionThe original omits it entirely. For jelly firm enough to unmold as a ball and sit on a leaf without slumping, use about 1 1/2 envelopes of powdered gelatine (roughly 3 1/2 teaspoons) per 2 cups of strained tomato liquid. A standard 1-envelope-per-2-cups aspic will hold a mold but sags at room temperature on a summer table.
- Cooking and straining the tomatoesSimmer ripe tomatoes 15 to 20 minutes until fully broken down, then press through a fine sieve, discarding skins and seeds. Two pounds of tomatoes yields roughly 2 cups of thin puree. Season the hot liquid with salt before adding the gelatine, since chilled aspic tastes flatter than warm.
- Forming the ballsSoften the gelatine in a few tablespoons of cold water, dissolve it in the hot tomato, then chill in small round-bottomed vessels: egg cups, demitasse cups, or the smallest muffin cups. Alternatively set the jelly in a shallow pan and scoop with a warmed melon baller once fully firm. Chill at least 4 hours.
- "Silvery white endive"Most likely blanched Belgian endive, sold as witloof chicory, rather than the frizzy green endive also called frisee; period American usage of "endive" was inconsistent, and the blanched hearts of curly endive are also pale. Either way the pale leaves supply the white in the red-white-and-blue scheme; separate them into whole spears and arrange them radiating outward.
- The blue platterThe blue is the dish, not the food. Any cobalt or willow-pattern plate does the work the recipe intends.
- French dressingIn American books of this period this means a simple vinaigrette shaken to temporary emulsion, about three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, not the sweetened orange-red bottled dressing that later took the name. Dress the endive only, and spoon a little over the jelly at the table so the aspic surface stays glossy.
- Yield and servingTwo cups of tomato jelly makes six to eight balls, enough for six as a first course or salad course. Assemble no more than 30 minutes before serving; the dressing weeps the endive and dulls the jelly if it stands.
Red-white-and-blue salads appear regularly in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the "No. 1" here implies at least one companion recipe for hostesses planning Fourth of July luncheons. They depended on two things arriving at once: cheap granulated gelatine, which from the 1890s let a cook set a savory jelly without boiling down calves' feet, and the fashion for salads composed for the eye and served on the plate rather than tossed in a bowl. The color scheme here is achieved with only one cooked element, the rest coming from the pale chicory and a piece of blue china, which tells you how much these menus leaned on tableware. It is also a reminder that tomato aspic, now read as mid-century, was already familiar in the salad chapter well before the First World War.