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Fozen Vegetable Salad
— Mrs. Dillon
9 large tomatoes. 1 stalk celery. 2 medium sized cucumbers. 1 green pepper. 1 tablespoon grated onion. 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce. 1/2 teaspoon grated horse radish. 1 cup cooked dressing. 1 cup whipped cream. Peel and cut fresh tomatoes in small pieces. Put in colander to drain. Peel cucumbers thick, cut through twice, make slices in quarters. Mix with tomatoes, add celery and pepper cut fine. Mix in sauce, horseradish and onion, sprinkle with salt. Then fold in lightly cooked dressing. Have melon mould ready. Put layer of salad and some of whipped cream, then layer of salad and cream, until mould is full. Pack in ice and salt for three or three and half hours. When ready to serve turn out on platter of pretty lettuce leaves. Garnish with pepper rings, pass dressing.
A moulded frozen salad of the ice-and-salt era, closer to a savoury semifreddo than to anything set with gelatin. Two things decide whether it works: how thoroughly the vegetables are drained, and how far you let it freeze.
- Drain harder than you thinkTomatoes and cucumbers are mostly water, and any liquid left behind turns to coarse ice crystals in the mould. Let the cut tomatoes drain in the colander at least 30 minutes, and salt and drain the cucumber pieces too before mixing.
- Ice and salt is not a modern freezerA mould packed in cracked ice and rock salt runs below freezing, how far depending on the proportion of salt used, and generally firms a mixture of this kind rather than driving it as hard as a modern freezer will. In a 0F home freezer the same mixture goes hard and icy in three hours; check at 90 minutes and expect it to be ready between then and two hours.
- "Cooked dressing"This means boiled dressing, the period's flour-thickened, egg-and-vinegar alternative to mayonnaise. Either make one or use a good mayonnaise loosened with a tablespoon of cider vinegar; straight mayonnaise alone is heavy once frozen.
- "1 stalk celery"In period usage "stalk" often meant the whole head rather than a single rib, though both senses were in circulation. Three or four ribs, finely diced, is the sensible reading for this quantity of tomato.
- Melon mouldA melon-shaped, lidded metal mould of the sort used for ice cream bombes, commonly in the region of a couple of quarts. A loaf pan or metal bowl lined with plastic wrap works and unmoulds more easily.
- Season above the freezing pointCold flattens salt, acid and pepper heat. Taste the mixture before it goes into the mould and season it slightly beyond what seems right at room temperature.
- Keep the cream in layersThe whipped cream is layered in, not stirred through, so the finished slices show a marbled pattern. Fold it in and you get a uniform pink mass instead.
- Unmoulding and yieldDip the mould in cool water for a few seconds and invert onto the lettuce. Serves eight to ten as a first course, and it should be sliced and eaten promptly, since it slumps quickly once out.
Frozen salads were a genuine fashion in American cooking from roughly 1910 through the 1920s, when domestic ice-and-salt freezing was well established and the electric refrigerator was beginning to arrive in middle-class kitchens. The dish shows off two things a hostess wanted noticed: that she could freeze something at home, and that she could turn it out of a shaped mould intact. The heavy hand with Worcestershire and horseradish is characteristic of the period's savoury frozen dishes, which relied on sharp seasoning to keep a cold, creamy mixture from tasting merely bland.