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Jellied Corned Beef and Vegetable Salad
1 pint clear beef stock or bouillon 1½ tablespoons granulated gelatine 3/4 cup diced, mixed, cooked vegetables Salt and pepper to taste Mazola Mayonnaise or cooked 3 tablespoons cold water 1½ cups finely diced cooked corned beef cream dressing Lettuce, cress or romaine Pour the water over the gelatine, soak five minutes and add to the stock which should be boiling. Put in a cool place when the stock which should be boiling. Put in a cool place when beginning to congeal, stir in the corned beef and vegetables, mixed.
Turn into a mould sparingly oiled with Mazola and let stand a few hours to become stiff. Unmould on a platter and garnish with the salad green and the mayonnaise to which two tablespoons of prepared horseradish may be added if desired.
A straightforward meat aspic from a corn-oil promotional cookbook, printed here with its two ingredient columns run together by the scanner. Read the list as: 1 pint clear beef stock or bouillon; 1½ tablespoons granulated gelatine; 3 tablespoons cold water; ¾ cup diced mixed cooked vegetables; 1½ cups finely diced cooked corned beef; salt and pepper; mayonnaise or cooked cream dressing; lettuce, cress or romaine.
- The hinge: chill to syrup firstEverything depends on letting the gelatine cool until it is the thickness of raw egg white before the meat and vegetables go in. Add them to warm liquid and the corned beef sinks to what will become the top of the unmoulded loaf, leaving a plain jelly cap.
- Gelatine in modern packets1½ tablespoons is 4½ teaspoons, or two ¼-ounce envelopes of unflavoured gelatine. Against 1 pint (2 cups) of stock that is a firm, sliceable set, which is what an unmoulded loaf needs — softer proportions will slump on the platter.
- BloomingPour the cold water over the gelatine and leave it five minutes to swell, then stir it into stock that is genuinely at a boil so the granules dissolve completely. Undissolved grains show up as gritty streaks in a clear jelly.
- Season harder than seems rightCold sets dull salt and pepper considerably. Taste the stock when it is hot, then taste again when it has cooled to syrup, and correct — bouillon cubes vary enormously in salt, and corned beef brings its own.
- MazolaCorn oil, and the reason this book exists. Any neutral oil films the mould equally well; use it very sparingly, wiping the mould with a paper towel, or the surface of the finished jelly turns cloudy.
- The corned beefCooked and cooled brisket, trimmed of fat and diced small — roughly half a pound to three-quarters gives 1½ cups. Deli-sliced corned beef works if it is not too wet; blot it and stack-cut it fine.
- Setting and unmoulding"A few hours" is vague; in a modern refrigerator allow several hours at least, and overnight is safer. To turn it out, dip the mould to the rim in warm water for five to ten seconds, loosen the edge with a fingertip, and invert onto a chilled wet platter so the loaf can be nudged into place.
- Size and yieldThe ingredients total a little over a quart, so use a 1- to 1½-quart mould or loaf tin. It serves four to six as a supper dish with the greens and dressing.
- The horseradish dressingWorth doing. The recipe's optional two tablespoons of prepared horseradish stirred into the mayonnaise cuts the richness of the jelly; drain the horseradish first or the sauce goes thin and weeps on the plate.
Jellied meat salads like this one belong to the moment when powdered gelatine turned aspic from a professional accomplishment into a weeknight possibility. A cook in 1800 wanting a clear jelly had to boil calves' feet and clarify the result over hours; by the 1910s and 1920s granulated gelatine came in measured envelopes, and the moulded salad became a fixture of American supper and luncheon tables — cool, sliceable, made a day ahead, and a tidy way to use up boiled beef and the odds and ends of cooked vegetables. The Mazola references mark this as a manufacturer's cookbook, one of the many issued by food companies in that era to teach households a new product by folding it into recipes they already recognised; here corn oil does nothing more culinary than grease the mould, but it gets its name printed twice.