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Tomato Jelly with String Beans
Cook tiny string beans until tender in boiling salted water; season while hot with onion juice, salt, pepper and tarragon vinegar. When cold add oil and toss the beans about until each bean is coated with the oil. Fill the centre of the jelly, fashioned in a ring mould, with the beans, and sprinkle over them a fine-chopped pimento. Garnish with lettuce leaves. Fine - chopped chives may be used in the place of the onion juice; they are particularly appropriate in any bean salad. If the beans are large, cut in halves lengthwise and the halves crosswise.
Tomato jelly may be served in a ring mould with turkey, oyster, plain chicken, French chicken, and other salads. The oysters should be scalded and drained, then marinated with French dressing.
Chicken and turkey should also be marinated before mixing with celery and the mayonnaise or boiled dressing.
This is an assembly note rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already set a tomato jelly (aspic) in a ring mould and tells you what to put in the hole. Read it alongside the tomato jelly recipe in the same book, or any modern tomato aspic.
- The hinge: dress the beans cold, not hotThe seasoning goes on while the beans are hot so they absorb the vinegar and onion juice; the oil goes on only once they are cold. Oil applied to hot beans seals them and dulls the surface, and warm beans will start to melt the jelly they sit against.
- Ring mould size and yieldRing moulds of this period commonly hold about 1 quart of jelly, which would serve six to eight as a salad course. The recipe specifies no quantities; something in the region of 1 lb of trimmed string beans should fill the centre.
- Cooking the beans"Until tender" in period cookery generally implied a softer bean than current taste prefers. Slender beans need 3 to 5 minutes in well-salted boiling water; shock them in ice water to hold the colour, since they will be sitting in acid dressing.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion and press the pulp through a fine sieve, or grate on a rasp and use the liquid; about a teaspoon is enough for a pound of beans. The chives suggested as a substitute are the better option if you want the beans to stay clean-tasting.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth having, but any good white wine vinegar with a bruised sprig of tarragon steeped in it for a day does the same work. The dressing here is essentially a loose vinaigrette built in the bowl rather than emulsified.
- PimentoCanned or jarred pimiento peppers, drained and blotted dry before chopping. Roasted red pepper is a fair stand-in; raw red bell pepper is not, being crisp and comparatively flat in flavour.
- UnmouldingDip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto the serving plate before arranging the lettuce, then fill the centre last so the beans are not disturbed.
- The oyster variation"Scalded and drained" gives a very brief cooking. Simmer only until the edges ruffle, about 2 minutes, then drain and marinate. Oysters held longer turn rubbery; anyone pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised should not eat lightly cooked shellfish at all.
Tomato jelly belongs to the great age of the moulded salad, roughly 1890 to 1930, when reliable granulated gelatine sold in packets made a firm aspic possible in an ordinary household kitchen rather than only in a professional one with a stockpot of calf's foot going. Janet McKenzie Hill, who edited the Boston Cooking School Magazine, was writing for a readership that prized this kind of composed, architectural salad course: a coloured ring, a contrasting filling, a border of lettuce, nothing left to chance on the plate. The closing lines here are the practical heart of the entry, since they treat the tomato ring as a piece of equipment more than a dish, a frame that can be filled with oyster, chicken or turkey salad as the meal requires. The insistence that meat and oysters be marinated in French dressing before being bound with mayonnaise is sound period technique and still is: the acid seasons the interior of the pieces in a way that a coating of dressing never manages.