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Frozen Tomato Salad
Take a can of tomatoes, season with salt, pepper and a tablespoon of sugar. Fill pound baking powder cans, pack in ice and salt and let stand for three hours. Turn out of the cans and slice. Serve on leaves of lettuce with French dressing or mayonnaise.
A savory ice from the era when the salad course could arrive frozen. The method is sound; only the equipment and the seasoning need attention.
- The hinge: freeze it hard, not solid-slushyThe tomato has to be firm enough to unmold and cut into clean rounds. Three hours in an ice-and-salt pack is the original's estimate; in a home freezer set to 0F, allow four to six hours and check that a knife meets real resistance before turning it out.
- Baking powder cansA one-pound baking powder tin of the period was a straight-sided cylinder, giving a narrow cylindrical mould that turned out and sliced neatly; sizes varied between brands. Line a similar tin or a small loaf pan with plastic wrap; do not reuse old soldered tins, whose seams may contain lead.
- A can of tomatoesCanned tomatoes of the day came in several standard sizes, most often around 20 to 32 ounces, so a modern 28-ounce can is a fair stand-in. Whole peeled tomatoes crushed by hand give better texture than puree, which freezes dense and icy. Drain off none of the juice unless the pack is unusually watery.
- The ice-and-salt packIf you follow the original, use roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt in a tub or cooler, buried to the top of the mold, with a drain for the brine. A freezer does the same job with less mess and no risk of salt water creeping into the tin.
- Season above the markCold flattens salt, acid and sweetness. Taste the mixture before freezing and take it a shade further than seems right at room temperature; the tablespoon of sugar is there to balance the tinny acidity of canned tomato, not to make it a dessert.
- French dressing, 1911 senseFrench dressing, period sense -- That means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked to a temporary emulsion, not the sweet orange bottled dressing of later decades. The recipe gives no proportions; something like three parts oil to one part vinegar, made fresh, suits it.
- Serving and yieldThe original fills more than one pound tin ('cans', plural); a 28-ounce can will need two. Slice with a thin knife dipped in hot water and serve at once; the rounds slump within a few minutes.
Frozen salads belong to a narrow window in American cooking, roughly the 1890s through the 1930s, when domestic ice supply and the hand-cranked freezer had become ordinary but mechanical refrigeration had not. Once a household could reliably make ice cream, the same salt-and-ice pack was turned on savory mixtures: frozen tomato, frozen cheese, frozen mayonnaise, frozen fruit salads bound with whipped cream. Butterick's cook book, published as an adjunct to the company's pattern and magazine business, was aimed at the middle-class housekeeper who wanted a course that looked like a caterer's work without a caterer's kitchen, and a molded tomato ice cut into rounds on lettuce did exactly that. The choice of a baking powder can as the mold is the telling detail: a can of tomatoes and an empty tin already in the pantry, dressed up into a course.