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Other Vegetable Salads (With the mixture Brush over)
with the mixture. Brush over the outside of the tomatoes with half-set aspic; when the aspic is set, repeat twice, then set aside on ice for some time before serving. Serve on a bed of lettuce seasoned with French dressing. Garnish each tomato with a sprig of parsley and the salad-dish with blocks of aspic. Anchovies or any cooked fish may be substituted for the lobster. Serve with mayonnaise.
This is the tail end of a recipe for stuffed tomatoes glazed in aspic — the page begins mid-sentence, and the filling instructions belong to the preceding paragraph. What survives here is the finishing technique, which is the fussy part.
- The hinge: "half-set aspic"Aspic is brushable only in a narrow window, when it has cooled to the consistency of raw egg white but has not yet firmed. Too warm and it runs off the tomato; too cool and it goes lumpy. Set the bowl of aspic in a larger bowl of ice water and stir, then work fast, returning it to warm water for a few seconds if it stiffens.
- Three coats, chilled betweenEach coat must be fully set before the next goes on, which means back to the refrigerator for 10-15 minutes between brushings. The three thin layers give a clear, even glaze that one thick pour will not.
- Aspic itselfThe book assumes you have a savory jelly on hand — clarified stock set with gelatin. Modern equivalent: 2 teaspoons powdered gelatin per cup of well-flavored, degreased chicken or fish stock, which sets firm enough to cut into the garnishing blocks called for.
- "Set aside on ice"The refrigerator will do; the recipe specifies only "for some time." The dish is served cold and the glaze will weep if it warms, so keep it chilled until it goes to the table.
- French dressingIn this period that means a simple vinaigrette shaken together — roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper — not the sweet orange bottled dressing the name now suggests.
- The fish substitutionThe original says "anchovies or any cooked fish," and cooked is the operative word. Use fully cooked lobster, crab or salmon, or preserved anchovy as the recipe itself allows; nothing here is heated after assembly.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; one stuffed tomato per person is the usual first-course serving, and enough aspic must be made for the three coats and for the garnishing blocks.
Aspic glazing of this kind was the mark of a well-run late-Victorian and Edwardian kitchen, a domestic echo of the professional French practice of chaud-froid and mirror-glazed cold entrée forms central to formal service. Cold, molded, jellied dishes were prized partly because they showed labor — clarifying stock and building a glaze in three coats is time no hurried cook has — and partly because they traveled well on a sideboard at a luncheon or supper served buffet-style. Commercial powdered gelatin, generally said to have reached American households in quantity around the turn of the century, is often credited with making recipes like this printable for the general reader, though prepared gelatine in other forms, along with isinglass, was available to cooks well before then. The pairing of lobster with tomato and mayonnaise places this firmly in the era's fashion for the elaborate cold seafood salad, the same impulse that produced shrimp in aspic rings.