Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Tomatoes Stuffed with Jelly
Chop one sweetbread and one cucumber fine.
To each cup (solid and liquid) add one-fourth a teaspoonful, each, of salt and paprica, a few drops of onion juice and a tablespoonful of capers; add also half a tablespoonful of granulated gelatine, soaked in two or three tablespoonfuls of cold water and melted over hot water. Stir until the mixture begins to congeal, then fill into tomatoes prepared as above. Set aside on the ice for half an hour, at least; then serve on lettuce leaves with either mayonnaise, boiled or cream dressing. Calf's brains, chicken, veal, tongue or ham may be substituted for the sweetbread. Tomates Farces à l'Aspic.
INGREDIENTS. 6 even-sized ripe tomatoes.
1 tablespoonful of capers.
1 pint of aspic jelly. 2 yolks of hard-boiled eggs. ½ a cup of lobster meat, Mayonnaise, parsley, letchopped fine. tuce.
Method. Scoop out the centres of the tomatoes, after removing the skin, and chill thoroughly.
Pass the yolks through a sieve, add to the lobster, with the capers, half a cup of mayonnaise and half a cup of chicken aspic, thick and cold, but not set; stir these in a dish standing in ice water until nearly set; then fill the cavities in the tomatoes
Two related recipes run together here: a stuffed tomato bound with gelatine, and the classic tomates farcies à l'aspic built on lobster and chicken aspic. Both are chilled salads that are never cooked after assembly, and one of the substitutions listed is unsafe at any temperature.
- Calf's brainsThe recipe offers calf's brains in place of sweetbread. Bovine central nervous tissue is the material most associated with BSE transmission, the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans; it is restricted or banned as food in many countries and should not be eaten. There is no preparation that makes it safe.
- The sweetbread is never cooked hereThe sweetbread is not cooked on this page -- The instruction begins "chop one sweetbread" with no soaking, blanching or poaching. The page follows on from an earlier recipe ("tomatoes prepared as above"), so a cooked sweetbread may have been assumed; as printed, however, there is no kill step before the offal goes into a cold gelatine mixture. Use a current recipe for any sweetbread dish.
- Gelatine strength has changed"Half a tablespoonful of granulated gelatine" to a cup of solids and liquid reflects early loose-granule products whose setting power was less consistent than today's. A period aspic recipe is not reliably convertible to a modern envelope without testing.
- Aspic jelly"One pint of aspic jelly" means a clarified, seasoned meat or poultry stock set with its own collagen or with added gelatine — not a commercial product. Chicken aspic, as specified in the second recipe, is simply strong chicken stock clarified with egg white and reduced until it sets.
- "Paprica"The older spelling of paprika; in American cookery of this kind it generally means the sweet, mild Hungarian-style powder, used as much for colour as for heat.
- Onion juiceGrated onion pressed through a cloth or sieve. A few drops give the allium note without visible pieces suspended in the jelly.
- "On the ice"The icebox, not a freezer. Half an hour is optimistic for a full set even in a modern refrigerator; an aspic of this size is likely to want considerably longer.
- YieldThe second recipe specifies six even-sized tomatoes. The first gives no yield at all: it is scaled by the cup of chopped solids and liquid, with no stated number of tomatoes.
Stuffed-tomato aspics belong to the high period of American cold-buffet cookery, when gelatine had become cheap and reliable enough for household use and the elaborate chaud-froid and aspic work of professional French kitchens filtered into the ladies' luncheon. The French title, tomates farcies \ is the tell: cookbooks of this generation often gave a dish its restaurant name alongside plain English instructions, signalling that the hostess was serving something a chef might have made. Sweetbreads, lobster and capers were all luxury markers, and the tomato \ still relatively new as a raw salad vegetable \ made a fashionable red case for them. The willingness to swap sweetbread, brains, chicken, veal, tongue or ham in the same formula reflects how these salads were really conceived: as a jelly-bound vehicle for whatever cold cooked meat the kitchen had, dressed up for the table.