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Italian Salad
Take as many varieties of cold vegetables as possible, such as new potatoes, sliced and cut up into fancy shapes, green peas, asparagus tops, French beans, cauliflower, beetroot, etc. Dress them with a little oil, tarragon vinegar, pepper, and salt, and place them in a mould. Take some aspic jelly, melt it, and pour it gently in the mould so that it fills up all the interstices between the vegetables. When the jelly is quite cold the vegetables can be turned out and sent to table in the shape given them by the mould.
A moulded vegetable salad set in savoury jelly — closer to what a later cook would call a vegetable aspic than to a bowl of dressed leaves. The hinge is temperature: the aspic must be liquid but barely warm when it goes over the vegetables, or it will cook the colour out of the peas and beans and slide off the oiled surfaces instead of gripping them.
- Aspic jellyA clarified, well-seasoned meat or poultry stock set firm with its own gelatine or with added leaf gelatine. If you are not making stock aspic, a strong clear broth set with roughly 1 sachet (7 g) of powdered gelatine per 500 ml should be firm enough to turn out; a softer set risks slumping.
- Melt it gentlyWarm the jelly over hot water only until it flows, then let it cool to blood heat before pouring. Hot jelly dulls green vegetables and bleeds beetroot into everything around it.
- Beetroot bleedsAdd cooked beetroot last, in its own layer at what will become the base, or dress and drain it separately. Otherwise the whole mould turns pink.
- Dress lightlyOil and vinegar on the vegetables works against the jelly's ability to cling. Use only enough to gloss them, and drain well before packing the mould — pooled dressing shows up as cloudy pockets in the set jelly.
- The mouldA 1 to 1.5 litre charlotte mould, loaf tin or pudding basin. Rinse it with cold water rather than oiling it; a film of oil is exactly what stops the jelly sitting cleanly against the sides.
- Setting time"Quite cold" means fully set through: 4 hours minimum in the refrigerator, better overnight. Turn out by dipping the mould in hand-hot water for a few seconds and inverting onto a chilled dish.
- VegetablesAll must be cooked and cold, and cooked no further than just tender — anything soft will smear when the jelly is poured. Blanched green beans, peas and asparagus tips hold their colour if refreshed in iced water.
- Yield and servingA 1.2 litre mould serves six to eight as a first course or a cold buffet dish. Keep refrigerated and eat within two days; a stock-based jelly is a good medium for bacteria once it has been standing at room temperature.
Nineteenth-century "Italian salad" had little to do with Italy in any strict sense; the name is generally said to have been applied loosely in English and French kitchens to composed salads of many diced cooked vegetables, often grouped with salade russe and macédoine. The dish brings together two skills — the dressing of cold vegetables and the use of aspic as a setting and glazing medium. Aspic was a mark of a serious kitchen in this period: it required a long-simmered, carefully clarified stock, and moulded work of this kind was one of the common ways of presenting cold food handsomely at a buffet or supper table. The instruction to cut potatoes "into fancy shapes" belongs to the same decorative tradition, where the point of the dish was as much its appearance turned out whole as its flavour.