ATLANTA — This is the betwixt season for tomatoes. Not quite fried-green tomato time, which is about October, when the air cools down so much that stragglers refuse to ripen and about all you can do is slice and fry them. Then again, we're pretty much past tomato sandwich time, that window in August when a thick slice of an heirloom between soft slices of bread fills you up and makes you smile.
So what to do with those still hanging on?
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Depending on your point of view, this next suggestion is going to delight or repulse you, and here's betting even money that it'll be the latter.
How about making tomato aspic?
For some of us, tomato aspic is a "no thank you" food.
But it's so good, says your host.
No thank you.
But I put artichokes and chopped olives in it.
No thank you.
Don't you wanna just try it?
Lordhammercy, deliver me Jesus, no!
Then there are those who think tomato aspic is as deliciously Southern and mouthwatering as pimento cheese or deviled eggs. For those folks, no luncheon or funeral repast is complete without it.
Yet, as revival foods go, aspic may have a much harder time ingratiating itself with the mainstream the way other retro comfort dishes have. There is the jiggle factor. There is the consistency factor. And there's the food-snob factor.
At its essence, tomato aspic is simply a highly seasoned, gelatinized tomato broth. Still, tomato aspic has popped up on the menus of a handful of influential restaurants around town, sometimes disguised by clever language or reinterpreted in such a way that it no longer resembles blue-haired lady food. Maybe its time has come?
"We had it on our menu for a while and I couldn't sell it too well, so I started calling it a tomato consommé, which it completely is not," said Doug Hawkins, a waiter at Watershed in Decatur. "One woman at a table ordered it, and at the end of the meal I told her, 'Hey, you know that wasn't consommé, it was aspic,' and she said, 'Oh, I'm so glad you didn't tell me that before because I never would have ordered it or have enjoyed it as much.' "
David "Andy" Carson, chef de cuisine at Quinones, does a variation he calls an heirloom tomato gazpacho, elegant and still, and "with a much more refined flavor" than a typical aspic.
Refinement, though not a word some would associate with aspic today, was exactly what it represented when it gained popularity around the end of the 19th century as a salad. This was a time of Fannie Farmer, the original domestic goddess, who promoted homemaking as a science. It was all about control, and that included food. A tossed salad was a hussy: too wild, willful and unsophisticated.
"The tidiest and most thorough way to package a salad was to mold it in gelatin," wrote Laura Shapiro in her 1996 book "Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century."
"It was very much the 'in' thing, in both the North and South" said Jan Langone, curator of American culinary history at the Clements Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "It was served at every banquet and at formal dinners because it was thought to be elegant."
Its popularity ebbed until about the 1950s, when gelatin companies such as Knox and Jell-O blitzed women's magazines and grocery stores with ads and pamphlets extolling the virtues of jiggly food, Langone said.
Particularly in the South, something took hold with tomato aspic. Somewhere along the way it became an article of faith on the buffet table, an ascension no one seems to really be able to explain. It was a staple of ladies' luncheons, Sunday suppers and, in particular, funeral repasts.
"You really cannot get a death certificate in Mississippi if there's not tomato aspic with homemade mayo at your funeral," said Gayden Metcalfe, co-author of "Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral."
"It's like stuffed eggs; it's a signature dish of death," Metcalfe said from her home in Greenville, Miss.
When she was pitching the book, she said, she found herself having to explain to some New York editors why a tomato aspic recipe was so essential to include in the book. They had no idea what it was, then someone described it as tomato Jell-O.
"And I said, 'That just sounds awful. Just think of it as a really wonderful congealed Bloody Mary,' " Metcalfe said.
Which is pretty much what it is at the Atlanta mainstay the Colonnade on Cheshire Bridge Road. Tomato aspic (with a side of mayo or blue cheese dressing, of course) has been on the menu for decades, but about seven years ago the restaurant changed the recipe.
Actually it just switched brands of Bloody Mary mix, the main ingredient in Colonnade aspic. Not a good move.
"It took a good two months to get it right, to tweak it, to make sure it wasn't too spicy or too mild," said Jodi Stallings, Colonnade general manager. "And we had to, because this is a huge item for us."
Jason Akins orders the aspic every time he goes to the Colonnade, and that's at least three times a week. At 38, he's of a generation that didn't grow up making tomato aspic, but ate it at their grandmothers' tables.
Akins is one of the few who not only appreciates it but makes it himself. ("I put pickled beets in mine," he said.) To him, aspic is something of a lost art, one that might be difficult to revive, at least for today's home cook, because "it is labor-intensive and takes a bit of skill."
"It's not just throwing lettuce on a plate," he said.
Rosalind Bentley writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. E-mail: rbentley AT ajc.com
