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Rainbow Salad
Two-quart mould. 1 pint each of tomato, cucumber, orange and lemon jelly. Pimolas, and hard-boiled eggs, white in bottom of mould; turn layer of tomato jelly in; when firm, alternate layers of others; scoop out centre, fill with cooked sweetbreads and mayonnaise.
A moulded ribbon salad of the sort that depended on a cook who already knew how to set an aspic; the original assumes you can make four separate jellies without being told the gelatin ratio. Read it as a plan of assembly rather than a full recipe.
- The hinge: set each layer only to tackyChill each pint until it is firm enough to support the next pour but still slightly sticky on top. Fully set, glassy layers will slide apart when the salad is turned out; too soft and the colours bleed into one muddy band.
- PimolasA trade name from the period for green olives stuffed with pimiento. Any pimiento-stuffed Spanish olive gives the same red-and-green cross-section, which is the whole point of laying them in the bottom of the mould.
- Gelatin is not specifiedNo setting quantities are given for any of the four jellies. For a mould that must stand up when unturned, work firmer than a spoonable jelly; follow the current package guidance for a firm mould.
- The volume does not add upFour pints of jelly is exactly two quarts, with nothing left for the olives, eggs and scooped-out centre. Make each jelly but expect to use roughly two-thirds of it; pour thin layers, about half an inch, and keep the surplus in a shallow pan to cube as garnish.
- Tomato and cucumber jellyBoth are savoury aspics: seasoned tomato juice or strained tomato pulp, and cucumber juice tinted faintly green, each set with gelatin and sharpened with lemon and salt. The orange and lemon jellies are sweet, so the mould sets savoury layers against sweet ones.
- SweetbreadsThe thymus or pancreas of a young animal, usually veal, ordered ahead from a butcher. They must be soaked in several changes of cold water, blanched, trimmed of membrane, then poached through and chilled before they go anywhere near mayonnaise. Cooked and cold is not optional here, since the filling is never heated again.
- UnmouldingChill the finished mould at least four hours, then dip the outside in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a wet platter. Scoop the centre only after it is turned out, and fill just before serving so the mayonnaise does not weep.
- YieldA two-quart mould serves ten to twelve as a first course or luncheon salad, cut in wedges so the stripes show.
Moulded salads like this belong to the decades either side of 1900, when reliable granulated gelatin turned aspic from a labour of calves' feet and long clarifying into something a domestic cook could do on a weekday. The appeal was almost entirely visual: layers of contrasting colour, olives and egg white set decoratively into the base so that the pattern appears when the mould is turned out, and a hollowed centre for a rich filling. Sweetbreads bound in mayonnaise were a standard luxury filling of the era, appearing in patty shells, timbales and vol-au-vents as often as in salads, and they signal that this was a company dish rather than family food. The pairing of savoury tomato and cucumber aspics with sweet orange and lemon jellies looks odd now, but the sweet-with-cold-meat habit ran deep in American entertaining and survives in the fruit-studded gelatin salads of later generations.