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Tomato Jelly Salad
Moisten one-half package of Larkin Gelatine in one-half cup of cold water. Heat and strain one quart can of tomatoes, seasoning with salt and paprika. Pour over Gelatine and mold. Serve with mayonnaise or boiled dressing, on lettuce leaves. This makes a very pleasing winter salad, when ripe tomatoes are not procurable
A plain tomato aspic from a company cookbook, built on a canned product and a brand of gelatine that no longer exists. The conversions are straightforward; the setting ratio is the only thing that needs judgement.
- The gelatineLarkin Gelatine came in packages and the company is long gone, so "one-half package" is genuinely ambiguous. For one quart of strained tomato, use about half an ounce of unflavoured powdered gelatine, which is two standard 7 g envelopes, softened in the half cup of cold water.
- Do not boil itThe hinge of the dish: soften the gelatine in cold water first, then pour the hot tomato over it and stir until fully dissolved. Boiling gelatine weakens its set and leaves a slight cooked-glue flavour.
- One quart canA quart can is 32 fl oz, close to two modern 14.5 oz cans of whole or crushed tomatoes with their juice. Heating and straining is worth doing properly — push through a fine sieve and discard the seeds and skin, or the jelly sets cloudy and grainy.
- SeasoningSeason the hot tomato more aggressively than tastes right, since cold sets dull salt and acid noticeably. A spoonful of lemon juice or a little onion juice sharpens what canned tomato loses; paprika here is for colour and mild sweetness, not heat.
- Molding and chillingRinse the mold in cold water rather than oiling it. Four hours in the refrigerator will set a ring mold; overnight is safer for anything deep. To unmold, dip the mold in warm water for five seconds and invert onto the lettuce.
- Boiled dressingThe alternative to mayonnaise here is the period's cooked dressing — egg yolks, vinegar, a little flour or cornstarch and butter, thickened over water. It is tangier and less rich than mayonnaise and suits the acidity of the aspic well.
- YieldA quart of jelly gives six to eight salad servings from a ring mold, or fills eight individual timbale molds.
This comes from a Larkin Company cookbook, and the recipe reads like one: the branded gelatine is named, the canned tomatoes are assumed. Larkin, of Buffalo, began as a soap manufacturer and grew into a mail-order house that sold groceries and household goods through club plans, distributing recipe booklets that steered cooks toward its own products. The dish itself sits in the great American vogue for molded salads that ran from the 1890s well into the mid-twentieth century, made possible by cheap granulated gelatine, which replaced the labour of boiling calves' feet for stock, and by domestic iceboxes reliable enough to set a mold. The closing line is the point of the whole thing — a canned tomato and a packet of gelatine put something bright and acidic on the winter table at a time when a fresh tomato in January was, for most households, simply not available.