In my article the other day about the states of matter of canned tomatoes, I forgot to mention one disgustingly horrible form of canned tomatoes that one used to be able to find: Tomato Aspic. Thankfully, in canned form, tomato aspic is largely unavailable these days I hope that it remains that way. (Full disclosure: my great grandmother forced me to eat tomato aspic with just about every meal when I visited her. I had never though jello could make me gag so quickly.)

For those not in the know, aspic is a form of savory gelatin. Think of it as salty jello with a hint of sour. It is vile stuff. The Wikipedia page on aspic prominently features a gelatin with both chicken and hardboiled eggs suspended within it. It was commonly used as a method to preserve food.

Tomato aspic takes the worst part of savory jello and combines it with raw tomato purée. It was a bad idea when someone thought it up and it remains a bad idea to this day. Just take a look at this loaf of congeled tomato sauce:

Thankfully, the days of ambiguous matter-state tomato were largely left behind at the end of the 1950's. For those looking for some vintage tomato recipes, however, here's a delightful layered tomato aspic conconction courtesy of Wrigley's Spearmint Chewing Gum. Ingredients include onion, celery, cucumber, cottage cheese, green pepper, and of course, tomato sauce and gelatin. I am not sure why a chewing gum company used this as an advertisement but perhaps it was because of the awful breath that you'd be left with after biting into this abomination:

There are a lot of canned tomato products. I mean, seriously, it's a little silly. Last night, while grocery shopping with my wife, I was asked to retrieve a cans of diced tomatoes, tomato purée, and tomato sauce. While searching through the mulitudes of sizes and flavors, I absent mindedly swapped purée for paste and grabbed the wrong can.

What took me back as I was searching was just how little I understood about canned tomato products and why they exist in such variety. So I decided to do some investigation: what types of canned tomatoes can one find in a typical American grocery store and what are they used for.

Whole Tomatoes

Starting from the largest and working our way down, we have whole tomatoes, both peeled and unpeeled. Peeled tomatoes are the most common variant and are made by first briefly boiling them to make the skin looser, removing the skin, and then placing them into a jar or can. While not particularly appetizing by themselves, they're easily turned into other "states" of tomato. Some sources that I have found suggest that canned, whole tomatoes are of a higher quality than other, more processed varieties, with the manufacturers sending dud tomatoes off to be chopped up.

Stewed Tomatoes

A variant of whole tomatoes, stewed tomatoes have been cooked — boiled longer than a typical whole tomato. This releases the flavor and makes them more suitable for adding to many recipes. Of course, it's easy enough to cook whole tomatoes, especially if the dish you'll be adding them to will be cooking further anyways. It is common to find stewed tomatoes with added ingredients and seasoning.

Diced Tomatoes

Diced (or chopped) tomatoes save some of the labor involved with working with whole tomatoes. Fairly self explanatory, they work well in salsas and sauces where you want full pieces of tomato. On the grocery store shelf, I found plain old diced and petite diced, as well as a myriad of flavor additives such as garlic, pepper, and oregano. Hunt's website lists no less than 14 different varieties. Yes, you read than correctly, one-four - fourteen.

Crushed Tomatoes

Take your canned tomatoes and mash them up. Boom, crushed tomatoes! Typically, crushed tomatoes will be run through a strainer to remove seeds and other large chunks. They're great for sauces and chilis where you're looking and some of the texture of tomatoes without the chunks.

Tomato Purée

Crushed tomatoes still too chunky for you? Try purée. Take the same, whole tomatoes but blend them instead of just crushing them. You'll still need to strain them to get the seeds and other large chunks out. This is what foods like pizza sauce and ketchup start as.

Tomato Sauce

So far as I can tell, tomato sauce is to tomato purée as stewed tomatoes are to whole tomatoes. It's been both liquified and then cooked. It will often have seasonings added to it as well. This is different than your typical "pasta" sauces, mind you, which almost certainly have added seasonings and non-tomato ingredients and may include chunks of tomatoes.

Tomato Paste

Tomato paste is the last major variation that canned tomatoes come in (to my knowledge). You take the tomato purée or sauce from the prior categories and then you cook it more. And then you cook it more. And then some more. Tomato paste is effectively highly reduced tomato sauce that has had most of its liquid cooked off. This is used when you want to add tomato flavor to a dish without adding extra liquid to a dish. It can actually help to thicken a dish to a modest degree.