Howdy, Jigglers! Today's recipe is one of the most ominously named in the entirety of JOJ: Ring Around the Tuna. Nothing sounds more like a match made in Jell-O heaven than "Ring Around the Tuna," right? This savory mold is made with lemon or lime Jell-O, grated onion, cucumber, celery, olives, pimento, and tuna coagulated together, to be served with lettuce and perhaps mayonnaise.
Now, of course, in my neverending quest to make the platonic ideal form of each JOJ recipe, I made a couple of adjustments here. I swapped out lemon Jell-O for unflavored gelatin with lemon juice and lemon zest (I recommend the juice of 1.5 lemons and the zest of 1), I omitted the grated onion (sue me!), and I didn't incorporate the tuna into the gelatin itself. That just seemed...wrong. In all the years I've had this book, I always looked at this recipe and figured that the tuna goes in the middle of the mold, as in the Ring mold goes Around The Tuna, for some reason, and I didn't want to change that notion when I made it. In fact, I always imagined that General Foods originally styled the photo for this recipe with a pile of tuna in the middle of the ring mold, but it turned out so horrific-looking that they had to cover it with curly endive to make it even vaguely presentable.
The other change I made was to halve the amount of the celery and cucumber, because, as I've explained many times before in these recipes, the amount of chunky ingredients seems wildly out of proportion to the quantity of gelatin called for, leading to misshapen molds that don't look smooth or even transparent enough to make out what's in them. If you want to feed Ring Around the Tuna to a crowd (and God bless you if you do), I highly recommend doubling the amount of water, gelatin, and juice/zest to accomodate all that greenery. In my case, I just wanted to make four lunch salads, so I opted to halve those bulky ingredients to get a better-looking mold.
Somehow, after all this time, I still don't have a non-Bundt-pan large ring mold, so I put it in this old-style mold that I call the jellyfish mold. This sort of proves my point about the proportions of this recipe, in that this thing is not going to even come close to filling up a large ring mold unless you at least double if not triple the recipe, in which case I still recommend using half the quantity of vegetables that the doubled or tripled recipe gives you for aesthetics and ease of cutting.
The method in this recipe is that of any basic Jell-O salad: you heat the gelatin in water (in my case I let it bloom on the water first, then heat only until dissolved to avoid getting gelatin stuck to your pot and thus not acting upon the recipe as you'd hope), you add cold liquid, you let it chill until slighly thickened, then you add the solids and place the whole kit and kaboodle into an oiled mold and chill until completely set. You then unmold.
So how did it go?
Remember how I mentioned earlier that I recommend flavoring this recipe with the juice of one-and-a-half lemons and the zest of one? Well, that's because I used the juice of three lemons and the zest of two, and it was a little much. In fact, it was so acidic that my stomach hurt a little after eating my first salad with it, consisting of half a can of tuna, a quarter of this mold, and some romaine lettuce. In subsequent servings I remedied this by applying a generous quantity of mayonnaise, which makes it more palatable. However, the intense lemon flavor does drown out a lot of the celery, cucumber, and olive flavors in the mold, hence my recommendation.
Due to my lack of a suitable ring mold, this is more like a Slice Beside the Tuna, but the idea is the same. Also, a side note: this recipe has never been and never will be fancy enough to warrant curly endive and radish roses. Sorry.
Other than my goof with the amount of lemon juice I forced into this poor gelatin mold, I like it pretty well. The flavors do suit tuna, and the salad, even with mayo added, is fairly light and healthy while being filling enough to sustain me in my job, which is fairly active. It's definitely low carb and gets those veggies and Vitamin C in.
All in all, this is not as bad as you'd think, although I would not serve it to any but the most experienced Jell-O enthusiasts. I don't know why or how it was dreamt up, but I guess I'm glad it was, which is more than I expected to say about this. So, good job, General Foods...?
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