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Frozen Tomato Salad
Open one quart can tomatoes, turn from can, and let stand one hour that they may be re-oxygenated. Add three table. spoons sugar, and season highly with salt and cayenne; then rub through a sieve. Turn into one-half pound breakfastcocoa boxes, cover tightly, pack in salt and ice, using equal parts, and let stand three hours. Remove from mould, arrange on lettuce leaves, and serve with Mayonnaise Dressing.
A savory tomato sherbet, frozen still (without churning) in tin boxes buried in salt and ice. The method translates directly to a freezer, but the seasoning and the texture both need attention.
- Season it hard, then taste coldFreezing mutes salt, sugar and heat dramatically. The instruction to "season highly" is not decoration; a mixture that tastes slightly too sharp and too salty at room temperature will taste flat once frozen. Adjust before it goes into the mould, since you cannot correct it afterward.
- "Re-oxygenated"A period belief that canned goods needed to stand open in the air to shed the taste of the tin. Modern cans and linings make this unnecessary, though an hour's rest does no harm. One quart of canned tomatoes is roughly a 28-oz can plus a little; two 14.5-oz cans with their juice is close enough.
- The sieve is the pointPushing the tomatoes through a sieve removes skin and seed fragments that would otherwise freeze into hard flecks. A food mill or a fine strainer works; a blender alone does not, since it purees the skins rather than removing them.
- Half-pound cocoa boxesSmall commercial tins; their exact capacity is uncertain, but half a pound of cocoa powder occupies well over a cup, so treat them as somewhere between a cup and a pint. Use ramekins or small straight-sided tins, covered with foil to keep the salt out and the surface smooth.
- Salt and ice, equal partsThat ratio makes a very cold brine and freezes the mixture hard and fast. A home freezer will do the job without the mess, but more slowly than the brine; allow four hours or more and set the moulds on a level shelf.
- TextureThis is a still-frozen ice, so it sets solid and slightly granular rather than smooth. Stirring or scraping it once or twice during the first hour breaks up large crystals. Let the moulds sit five minutes at room temperature before unmoulding, or dip them briefly in warm water.
- Yield and servingA quart of tomatoes gives roughly four cups of purée, so how many moulds you get depends entirely on their size. Serve at once on chilled plates; the ice slumps quickly at the table.
- The mayonnaiseThe Mayonnaise Dressing referred to is a raw-yolk emulsion. If you make it from scratch, use pasteurized eggs, particularly if anyone at the table is elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised.
Frozen savory salads had a real vogue in American cooking around the turn of the twentieth century, when commercial ice delivery and the home ice-cream freezer made it ordinary to freeze something for dinner rather than just for dessert. A frozen course signaled a certain formality, and tomato \table as a vegetable, and by the 1890s available canned year-round at low cost \\ was the natural candidate for a chilled salad that could be made in January. The improvised mould here is worth noting: half-pound breakfast cocoa tins seem to have been common enough in the pantry, and cookbooks of the period sometimes appear to have repurposed commercial packaging as kitchen equipment, the same instinct that put baking-powder cans to work as popover and steamed-pudding moulds.