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Frozen Salad
Remove the contents of a quart can of tomatoes, flavor with salt, pepper, a very little onion juice, and a teaspoonful of sugar. Put the mixture through a sieve, pour into a mold and freeze in salt and ice (using half and half) for three hours.
Turn out and serve surrounded by endive leaves.
A savoury tomato ice served as the salad course. The whole thing hinges on texture: with no fat and almost no sugar, sieved tomato freezes into a hard, crystalline block, so how you freeze it and how long you let it stand before serving matter more than the seasoning.
- The quart canA quart can of tomatoes is roughly 28-32 oz, or about 3 1/2 to 4 cups with juice. Modern 28-oz cans of whole peeled tomatoes are the closest equivalent; use the juice as well as the flesh.
- Salt and ice, half and halfThe recipe does not say whether by weight or volume; either way a heavy salt-and-ice mix pushes the brine down toward about -6F, which is why three hours sets the mold solid. A domestic freezer at 0F will also do it, though it takes longer and tends to give a coarser grain.
- Still-frozen, not churnedNothing here is stirred, so ice crystals grow large. If you want a smoother result, break the block up and beat it once or twice during freezing, or freeze it flat and scrape it into a granita.
- Serve it slightly softTurned out straight from the salt and ice it will be too hard to eat with a fork. Let the mold stand at room temperature for five to ten minutes, or dip it briefly in warm water, before unmolding.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press a wedge in a garlic press. "A very little" is accurate: a quarter-teaspoon is plenty for a quart, as onion sharpens considerably in the cold.
- Season above the markCold blunts salt and acidity. Season the puree so it tastes faintly too strong at room temperature and it will taste correct frozen.
- EndiveThe word was used loosely in this period for both Belgian endive, the pale forced chicory, and curly endive or frisee. Belgian endive's spear-shaped leaves stand up well around a molded ice; curly endive also works.
- YieldRoughly three cups of puree, which serves four to six as a salad course, or more in small individual molds.
Frozen savoury salads had a real vogue in American entertaining from roughly the 1910s through the 1940s, and they belong to the same period as the spread of the domestic ice-cream freezer and, later, the mechanical refrigerator. Much of the genre was rich — frozen tomato mayonnaise, cream cheese and pimiento molds, fruit salads bound with whipped cream — and this version sits at the lean end, essentially a tomato ice standing in for a first course, in the same family as the tomato sorbets and granites that still turn up on tasting menus. The reliance on a quart can rather than fresh tomatoes is also of its moment: canned tomatoes were a year-round staple in American kitchens, and cookbooks of this period reach for the can without apology.