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FOWL JELLY (in cakes)
Take ten pounds of the leg of beef, two cowheels, a knuckle of veal, a couple of old fowls, and the trimmings of any thing at hand, with the bones, etc., broken in pieces; cover with water, and boil gently, adding a bunch of sweet herbs, a blade of mace, an onion, a bit of lemon-peel, and some whole peppers, and salt to taste. Boil six hours; clear off the fat, strain, and let the mixture cool, when every particle of grease must be removed. When cold, put it over a quick fire, and boil till the jelly clings to the wooden spoon, when it may be poured out into a buttered tin. When quite cold, cut it into strips, and store carefully in a tin box, to be dissolved for gravy or soups.
This is meat glaze — glace de viande — cut into cakes, the Victorian ancestor of the stock cube. Nothing about the method is difficult, but the whole thing hinges on the final reduction and on how you store what you make.
- Scale it downTen pounds of beef shin, two cowheels, a veal knuckle and two fowls will want a 3-4 gallon stockpot and yields a great deal of glaze. A quarter of the quantity — about 2 1/2 lb shin, one cowheel or a split pig's trotter, and one stewing hen — fits an 8-quart pot and gives roughly a cup of finished glaze.
- Cowheels and old fowlsCowheels are the collagen engine of the recipe; a butcher will order them, or substitute split veal knuckles or pig's trotters. "Old fowls" means spent laying hens, tough and deeply flavoured — a stewing hen or two large chicken carcasses plus wings does the same work. A modern roasting chicken has too little gelatin to matter here.
- A blade of maceOne blade is a shard of the lacy covering of the nutmeg; a pinch of ground mace stands in for it. The "bunch of sweet herbs" would usually be something like parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string.
- Salt very lightly, or not at allThe liquid is going to be reduced perhaps twentyfold. Season the stock barely, or leave it unsalted, and salt the finished gravy or soup instead. Glaze salted to taste at the six-hour mark is inedible by the end.
- The hinge: the second boilAfter straining and chilling, lift every trace of fat — fat is what makes the cakes rancid — and then reduce hard, but drop to a low simmer in the last stages and stir constantly. Reduced stock scorches without warning, and burnt glaze cannot be rescued. It is done when it coats the back of a spoon in a syrupy, sticky sheet and a smear cools tacky rather than runny.
- Setting and cuttingA buttered tin means any shallow rimmed pan; pour to about 1/4 inch. Chill until firm and rubbery before cutting into strips. A silicone ice-cube tray does the same job with less fuss.
- Storage, which the book gets wrongStorage -- The book's tin box in a cool larder assumes a glaze reduced hard enough to be nearly dry; anything softer than that will not keep at room temperature. Safer to keep the cakes in the refrigerator for a week or two, or freeze them; frozen cubes keep for months and dissolve straight into a pan.
- Using itOne cake, about a tablespoon, enriches a pint of soup or makes a pan sauce when whisked into deglazed juices. It is a flavouring, not a broth base on its own.
Cakes of dried stock like this were known in English kitchens as "portable soup" from the mid-eighteenth century, and the same preparation is glace de viande in the French professional kitchen — stock boiled down until the gelatin sets it solid. It was provisioning as much as cookery: portable soup is generally traced in naval history to the victualling of long voyages, where a box of dry cakes replaced barrels of liquid. By the later nineteenth century commercial meat extracts were arriving to do the same job from a jar, and the home-made version steadily disappeared from the ordinary kitchen while surviving in restaurant practice.