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Frozen Tomato Salad
1 can tomatoes. 1 small onion. 1/2 cup celery. 1 teaspoon salt. 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce. 1/2 teaspoon paprika. 1 cup whipped cream. Chop celery and onion and put on fire with tomatoes and cook until soft. Mash through a sieve. There should be one cup thick puree. Add salt, paprika, and when cold fold in one cup whipped cream. Put in mold and pack in salt and ice for three hours. Turn out and slice. Serve in slices on lettuce leaves. Neufchatel balls are pretty laid on the slice or around if in small molds.
A frozen savory salad from the era when the ice-cream freezer and the salt-packed mold were standard summer equipment. It works, but the freezing method and a few proportions need translating.
- The hinge: reduce to a genuinely thick pureeOne can of tomatoes cooked down and sieved will not give a thick cup unless you keep it on the heat well past soft. A thin puree freezes into tomato ice with weeping cream rather than a sliceable mousse.
- Salt and ice, or a freezerPacking a mold in a bucket of crushed ice and rock salt (roughly three parts ice to one part salt) freezes from the outside in and gives a firm, unstirred block in about three hours. A modern freezer does the same job in four to six hours; use a metal loaf pan or terrine, press plastic wrap to the surface, and let it sit ten minutes at room temperature before unmolding.
- "1 can tomatoes"In this period that most likely meant a No. 2 can, about 2 1/2 cups or 20 oz. A standard 14.5 oz can today is smaller; use a 14.5 oz can plus about half of another, and expect to reduce it hard, since the recipe's own check is one cup of thick puree.
- The missing WorcestershireIt is listed in the ingredients and then never mentioned in the method. Add the teaspoon with the salt and paprika, off the heat, while the puree is still warm.
- Whipped creamWhip to soft peaks only, unsweetened, and fold in when the puree is fully cold or the cream will slacken and separate. Overwhipped cream turns grainy once frozen.
- NeufchatelAmerican Neufchatel is a soft, lower-fat fresh cheese sold alongside cream cheese; roll teaspoons of it into balls and chill firm before plating. Either cheese works.
- Yield and timingAbout a pint of mixture, six small servings. Cut with a warm knife and serve immediately; it softens at the edges within a few minutes on the plate, so dress the lettuce and have it ready.
Frozen salads had a vogue in American cookbooks in the first decades of the twentieth century, once ice delivery and, later, mechanical refrigeration put freezing within reach of a household kitchen rather than a hotel. If this is Mrs. Wilson of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, who was involved in food-conservation work during the First World War, it fits her reputation as a practical, thrifty writer: a salad built on a can of tomatoes and a cup of cream turns pantry staples into something that looks like company food. The salt-and-ice mold is the same apparatus used for ice cream, but without churning, so the result sets as a dense block that slices -- hence serving it in neat rounds on lettuce leaves. Paprika and Worcestershire were common seasonings in savory dishes of the period.