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Jellied Salad in Tomato Cases (As sweetbreads at this season)
As sweetbreads at this season are plentiful, they may be used in connection with the jelly or any vegetable mixture may be substituted as preferred. A rather new way of serving cucumbers is to pare and grate them and to drain off half of the clear liquid. To the remaining liquor and pulp take for each cupful, one-half of a tablespoonful of granulated gelatine and soak in a few spoonfuls of water; when soft, set over hot water until melted. Add this to the prepared cucumbers, together with salt and white pepper to taste and one tablespoonful of lemon juice. Allow one good sized tomato for each person, cut off the stem ends, scoop out the pulp and turn upside down to drain. Fill with the cucumber mixture (to which some fine cut meat may be added if desired), and stand on ice until the mixture jellies. Serve in lettuce cups, decorating the top of each tomato with a spoonful of mayonnaise and serving with it a small dish of the dressing.
A turn-of-the-century luncheon salad: grated cucumber set with a little gelatine and packed into hollowed tomatoes. The whole thing hinges on getting water out of the cucumber before the gelatine goes in.
- Drain harder than it saysGrated cucumber is mostly water, and the recipe only asks you to pour off half the clear liquid. Salting the grated flesh lightly and letting it sit in a sieve for 20-30 minutes before measuring gives a filling that holds its shape instead of weeping in the tomato.
- Gelatine strengthHalf a tablespoon is 1 1/2 teaspoons, roughly two-thirds of a modern 1/4-oz envelope, per cup of pulp and juice. Modern granulated gelatine is more reliably standardised than the 1900 product, so a scant 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup is enough for a sliceable but tender set.
- Melting the gelatine"Set over hot water until melted" means a bowl over simmering water, not direct heat. Let the melted gelatine cool for a minute before stirring it into the cold cucumber, or it will seize into strings.
- Preparing the tomato casesAfter scooping, salt the insides lightly and drain them cut-side down for at least 15 minutes. Tomato interiors release a surprising amount of liquid and will thin the jelly at the base.
- SweetbreadsIf you use them, they need full preparation first: soak in several changes of cold water, blanch, press under a weight, trim the membrane, then dice. Raw or under-poached sweetbreads should not go into a cold salad, and they should be cooked through and chilled before they meet the gelatine.
- "Stand on ice"An icebox instruction. The refrigerator does the same job; allow 3 to 4 hours for a firm set, and keep the filled tomatoes covered so they do not pick up other odours.
- White pepperSpecified for appearance, so no black specks show in a pale jelly. Black pepper will do the job if it is what you have, though it looks different and its flavour is not identical.
- Yield and servingOne tomato per person, as a first course or a light lunch plate. A cup of drained cucumber pulp fills roughly two to three medium tomatoes, so scale the gelatine by the cup rather than by the number of cucumbers.
Jellied salads like this one belong to the brief, confident era when granulated gelatine came out of the packet rather than off a calf's foot. Commercial granulated gelatine reached American kitchens around 1890, and cookbooks of the following decade filled up with moulded vegetable jellies, aspics and stuffed "cases" of tomato, cucumber or green pepper, all of which suited the domestic icebox and the fashion for cold, decorative luncheon food. The offhand note that "sweetbreads at this season are plentiful" is a reminder of how closely such menus still tracked the butcher's calendar: sweetbreads come from young animals and were treated as a seasonal item, plentiful enough here to be used as a filler for a salad. The placement of the dish in a sandwich chapter is not an error so much as a category that once covered the whole territory of light, cold, hand-assembled luncheon fare.