Home › Bridge Party Menus › Stuffed Tomato Salad No. 3
Stuffed Tomato Salad No. 3
6 medium sized tomatoes 1/2 cup apples, diced 1/2 cup celery, diced 1/4 cup walnuts, cut up 1 package lemon jello 1 cup mayonnaise Peel tomatoes and scoop out centers. Fill centers with apple, celery and walnuts. Set each tomato in a cup and fill up the cup with hot lemon jello. Chill until firm, turn out on lettuce and serve with mineral oil mayonnaise.
The salad itself is a period aspic, but the dressing it calls for is not food. The notes below explain why this one belongs on the shelf as a document rather than in the refrigerator.
- Mineral oil mayonnaise"Mineral oil mayonnaise" was a reducing-diet product of the 1920s and 1930s in which liquid petrolatum replaced salad oil, on the theory that a fat the body cannot absorb contributes no calories. Mineral oil taken by mouth acts as a laxative, carries fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K) out of the body undigested, and can be aspirated into the lungs, where it causes lipoid pneumonia. It is not an edible fat and has no place in a salad dressing.
- Why not simply swap the dressingThe mineral oil dressing is what the book specifies to serve alongside, though nothing in the method depends on it; an ordinary mayonnaise would serve the same purpose if you wanted to make the salad.
- What "1 package lemon jello" meantA package of flavoured gelatine dessert in this period was generally around 3 ounces of powder, made up with about a pint of liquid — sweeter and softer-setting than the savoury tomato aspics of the same era.
- The cup mould"Set each tomato in a cup" means a small cup — teacup or custard cup — used as a mould; the tomato is suspended in the setting gelatine and turned out upside down onto lettuce. Six tomatoes implies six individual moulds and six servings.