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Game in Aspic Jelly
Make as much aspic jelly as will fill your mould. Put a little at the bottom, let it stiffen, then arrange in it the remains of cold game, cut into neat pieces, and alternately with them slices of pink ham, pieces of hard-boiled eggs, or anything that will add to the appearance. Do not crowd the meat, but leave room for the jelly to go between the pieces. Fill up the mould with jelly, and set in a cool place. Before serving, dip the mould for a second or two in boiling water, to make it turn out more easily. Time, twelve hours to set the jelly. Suitable for a breakfast or luncheon dish.
A cold-larder assembly dish that depends almost entirely on the jelly: everything else is leftovers arranged to look deliberate. Two things decide whether it works — the set of the aspic and the temperature at which you pour it.
- Aspic jelly, in this bookA clarified, well-seasoned brown or game stock set with gelatine; period aspic recipes of this kind generally rely on calf's foot or sheet gelatine with wine or vinegar and aromatics, cleared with egg white, though this recipe gives no formula of its own. Modern equivalent: roughly 1 oz / 28 g powdered gelatine per litre of strong stock for a jelly firm enough to unmould, a little less if the stock is already gelatinous from bones.
- Pour it cool, not warmThe hinge of the dish. Fill the mould with jelly that has cooled to the point of thickening slightly but still flows; hot jelly floats the meat, greys the ham and melts the layer already set beneath.
- "Cold game"Roast pheasant, partridge, grouse, hare or venison left from a previous meal, off the bone and trimmed of skin and sinew. Cold roast chicken, duck or guinea fowl behaves identically if game is not to hand.
- "Pink ham"Cured, cooked ham cut in thin slices; the colour is much of the point, and with the hard-boiled egg the recipe also calls for it supplies most of the contrast in an otherwise brown mould. Modern nitrite-cured ham holds its pink well in jelly.
- Setting time and placeTwelve hours in "a cool place" means an unheated larder. In a refrigerator the jelly will be firm in four to six hours, but overnight is still worth it: the flavours settle and the layers bond. Keep it refrigerated throughout — cooked meat suspended in stock at room temperature is a hospitable medium.
- UnmouldingA second or two in boiling water is literal; longer and the outer surface slumps. A dry cloth wrung out in hot water, wrapped round the mould, gives more control. Loosen the edge with a fingertip, invert onto a wetted plate so the jelly can be slid into position.
- Building the layersWork in stages rather than filling at once: set a shallow base, arrange one layer, barely cover it with cool jelly, chill until tacky, then continue. Pieces packed tight will show as a solid block of meat with no jelly between them, which is exactly what the instruction warns against.
- YieldA 1.5-pint / 850 ml mould takes roughly 350–450 g of picked meat and ham with the rest jelly, and serves four to six as the breakfast or luncheon dish intended. Serve with a sharp salad; the jelly is rich and needs acidity.
Aspic belongs to the cold table of the nineteenth-century English house, where a mould turned out whole was both an economy and a display: leftovers reappeared at luncheon looking like something a chef had planned. The method is generic — the jelly is the recipe, the meat is whatever the larder holds. The technique depends on gelatine extracted from calves' feet, knuckle bones and pig skin, laboriously clarified with egg white and shell; commercial sheet and powdered gelatines were spreading through British kitchens over the second half of the century and made such dishes possible in households without a large stockpot. Aspic work fell out of domestic fashion in the later twentieth century, though it never left the professional charcuterie repertoire.