The Tomato Jelly Salad experiment

This weekend, the time came to make the previously-mentioned Tomato Jelly Salad, a tomato aspic dish that is in the suggested Thanksgiving menu in the Silent Hostess cookbook from 1930.

Here is the recipe, from page 50 of the Silent Hostess Treasure Book. The Tomato Aspic is the basis of the salad, so I’ll list it first:

Tomato Aspic
2 tablespoons gelatin
1/4 cup cold water
1/2 cup boiling water
4 cups tomatoes, fresh or canned
1 tablespoon chopped onion
1/2 teaspoon celery seed
2 or 3 whole cloves
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
2 teaspoons lemon juice

Soak the gelatin in cold water and dissolve in boiling water. Cook the tomatoes, onions, celery seed, cloves, salt and sugar for fifteen minutes. Strain through fine strainer or cheese-cloth; add lemon juice and dissolved gelatin. This may be molded at once or it may be kept in covered jar in refrigerator Cabinet until needed. To use, take out what is wanted and melt over hot water. Suggestions for several variations follow.

Tomato Jelly Salad
Fill individual molds which have been dipped in cold water with Tomato Aspic. Chill until firm. Unmold on crisp lettuce and serve with mayonnaise dressing.

And on page 57, the dressing:

Mayonnaise dressing
2 egg yolks
1/4 cup vinegar
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon salt
1 pint salad oil

Beat egg yolks and add few drops of vinegar. Drop oil, drop by drop, into egg mixture until one-fourth cup is used. Then gradually increase the amount of oil added, beating constantly. As mixture thickens , add the rest of the vinegar a little at a time, Add salt. Lemon juice may be used in place of vinegar, if preferred.

I got canned tomatoes, as at this time of year, it’s likely that a homemaker in 1930’s Seattle wouldn’t have access to fresh tomatoes. I thought about adding some Tabasco or something else to give it some spice, but decided it was better to follow the recipe as is for testing purposes. After cooking the mixture of tomatoes and spices, I drained the tomato puree, mixed the juice with gelatin, and poured it into some cups to mold.

Then the cups went into the refrigerator to chill. A bit later, Kristen and I made the mayonnaise. Living dangerously, we decided to risk an uncooked egg mayo. (The eggs were, at least, organic and well-washed.) Making mayonnaise is slow (dripping the oil in, drop by drop) but the results are pretty good. The recipe above probably includes too much salt, though.

Then, it was time to eat the Tomato Jelly Salad, served on a lettuce leaf with a jaunty cap of mayonnaise. (Unfortunately, we accidentally froze our lettuce, so the lettuce leaf itself was a little bit icky. It worked ok for photos, though.)

Verdict:

I have an odd ambivalence about this. It doesn’t exactly taste bad — it tastes like V-8 or tomato juice, and I like V-8. But for some reason I don’t really want to make this or eat it again. I think it’s got to be a textural thing. V-8 is great, but gelatinous V-8? Well, I’ve never developed a taste for it. It feels odd to me. I don’t hate this, or even exactly dislike it, and the flavor is OK, as I said. It’s just not really likable.

Kristen tasted it, and did not like it. Jason suggested that it might be better sliced on crackers. Perhaps. The next morning, he ate it in cubes mixed with fried egg, and said “ehhh, I probably won’t eat any more.” Jesse tried it, and his response was about the same as mine.

So, the mystery remains: why did gelatin salads take US culinary habits by storm in the early 20th Century? Based on the evidence of the Tomato Jelly Salad, we can’t yet imagine why. But we will experiment further.
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Ready to go

The supplies are here. The lettuce is in the fridge, and I didn’t bother photographing the salt and sugar, etc., but the items pictured here are the rest of those needed to cook the 1930 Tomato Jelly Salad recipe. Stay tuned to see how it goes.

In the meantime, here’s an old recipe for Tomato Jelly — not the same one I’m going to use, but sort of similar. I kind of like that this one has Tabasco in it. Makes it a little more like spicy V-8.

And a bonus illustration of another aspic recipe that I believe I will avoid:

Both of these are from Practical Cooking and Serving: a Complete Manual of How to Select, Prepare, and Serve Food by Janet McKenzie Hill, 1902. (These are Google Books clips, so you may not be able to see them if you’re outside the US. I apologize.)

Time for a big aspic challenge

Aspic. When was the last time you ate it? Have you ever? Maybe not. It’s not really popular these days.

How about gelatin in general? When was the last time you had gelatin (as a major part of a meal, not just a minor ingredient) that wasn’t some brightly-colored fruity-sweet hue? (Heck, I can’t even remember the last time I ate Jell-O.)

As a child, I had Jell-O a lot. (And I use the brand-name here because brand-name Jell-O was what we ate. Orange. Cherry. Lime. Whatever.) It was always dessert of some sort. Plain, much of the time, or other times with whipped cream on top or as part of some fruit salad mixture at a family or church get-together. (Few things said “1970s church picnic” like a Jell-O fruit salad.)

What I didn’t know at the time was that these gelatin salads were sort of a last vestige of a gelatin salad craze from a few decades earlier.

The 1920s, if the cookbooks can be believed, were gelatin-crazed. Salads, particularly, were not complete without the clear, jiggly stuff. The Silent Hostess Treasure Book from 1930 says, “With a supply of salad greens, a jar of dressing, and some tomato or lemon aspic in your refrigerator you will be able to prepare a great variety of delicious salads on short notice.” To the 21st century cook, only the greens and dressing would be necessary. But the 1920s homemaker would need aspic to be acceptably chic.
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