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Tomatoes in Aspic
Peel six small firm tomatoes, and remove pulp, having opening in tops as small as possible. Sprinkle insides with salt, invert, and let stand thirty minutes. Fill with vegetable or chicken salad. Cover tops with Mayonnaise to which has been added a small quantity of dissolved gelatine, and garnish with capers and sliced pickles. Place a pan in icewater, cover bottom with aspic jelly mixture, and let stand until jelly is firm. Arrange tomatoes on jelly garnished side down. Add more aspic jelly mixture, let stand until firm, and so continue until all is used. Chill thoroughly, turn on a serving dish, and garnish around base with parsley.
A moulded salad that depends entirely on temperature control: every layer must set firm before the next is poured, or the tomatoes drift and the jelly clouds. Set aside an afternoon and keep the pan in ice water throughout.
- The hinge: pour cool, not warmAspic mixture poured over a set layer must be cold and just syrupy — barely fluid — or it melts the layer beneath and the tomatoes shift. Pour a shallow depth at a time and let each set hard in the ice bath before adding more.
- Aspic jellyThe book means a clarified, well-seasoned stock set with gelatine, presumably given as a separate recipe elsewhere in the book. Modern granulated gelatine may set more firmly than the sheet or shredded gelatine of the period, so begin with about 1 envelope (2 1/4 tsp) per 2 cups of stock, which gives a jelly firm enough to unmould and slice.
- "Dissolved gelatine" in the mayonnaiseA teaspoon or so of gelatine softened in cold water and melted, stirred into about 1/2 cup mayonnaise, keeps the topping from washing off when the aspic is poured. Add it barely warm — hot gelatine will split the mayonnaise.
- Salting and inverting the tomatoesThe thirty minutes upside down is not optional; it draws out the water that would otherwise leach into the jelly and turn it soft and pink. Blot the cavities dry before filling.
- PeelingScore the skins and dip 15 to 30 seconds in boiling water, then into cold; the skins slip off without cooking the flesh.
- Mayonnaise and raw eggThe book's mayonnaise is uncooked yolk, and the finished dish is never heated. If serving to anyone frail, elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised, use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise.
- Pan and unmouldingA loaf pan or ring mould of roughly 6 to 8 cups should suit six small tomatoes. To turn it out, dip the pan a few seconds in warm water, run a thin knife round the edge, and invert onto a chilled platter.
- Yield and timingServes six as a first course or luncheon dish. Allow several hours' chilling in total; covered in the refrigerator it should hold a day or so, after which the jelly may begin to weep.
Aspic work was a show-piece of turn-of-the-century American entertaining, and a moulded dish had the advantage that it could be built the day before and carried whole to the table — a considerable advantage in a household with one cook and no refrigeration beyond an icebox and a supply of block ice, which is why the recipe assumes a pan standing in ice water rather than a chilled cabinet. The name comes from the French aspic, for a savoury jelly of clarified stock; the word's older sense is the asp, and the connection is usually traced, without much evidence, either to the coiled shape of a ring mould or to the cold of the jelly. Tomatoes had only fairly recently become common as a raw salad vegetable in American cookery, having been eaten mainly cooked through much of the nineteenth century, and stuffing them raw with chicken salad suggests they had come to be treated as a fashionable centrepiece rather than a curiosity.