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PLOVERS' EGG SALAD (a la Chartreuse)
Take a plain charlotte mould, and line it with pale aspic jelly; cut some hard-boiled plovers' eggs in slices; take the largest centre pieces and put them in a ring, overlapping, at the bottom of the mould, with a star-shaped slice of truffle in the centre; put a row of chervil leaves in between. Proceed with rows of egg slices and chervil leaves until within an inch of the edge of the mould, remembering that each row of sliced eggs should overlap in the contrary direction to the one preceding it. That is, work first from right to left, then from left to right. The last row in the mould should be of small stars of truffle; thus, when turned out, there will be truffle at bottom and top, and a very artistic dish is the result. Now cut up any egg that is left, add a little chicken or ham in dice, mix it with any nice salad mayonnaise, turn out the mould, and put the salad inside. The mould should stand on ice for half an hour before turning out.
The construction here is sound period work, but the defining ingredient cannot legally or ethically be obtained. The problem is the eggs, not the technique.
- Plovers' eggs are off the tableThe eggs sold under this name in Victorian and Edwardian London were mainly those of the northern lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), with black-headed gull eggs frequently passed off as the same. Lapwing numbers collapsed in the twentieth century; egg-taking was progressively restricted over the course of the century, and the bird and its eggs are protected under current British wildlife legislation. Gulls' eggs are still taken under licence in England in season, but there is no lawful supply of lapwing eggs.
- Not a matter of substitutionThe recipe's whole point is the small, close-packed, mottled slices that only a small wild egg gives, and a dish built around a protected species should be left in the book rather than rebuilt. If you want a moulded aspic egg salad, work from a current recipe written for farmed eggs.
- The aspic is the other weak pointA savoury jelly set with unmeasured stock gelatine, filled with mayonnaise and diced cooked chicken or ham, and held on ice for only half an hour, sits in the temperature range where those fillings spoil. The timings assume a cold larder and prompt service.
- Vessel and scaleA plain charlotte mould is the straight-sided, slightly tapered tin, commonly somewhere between 1 and 2 quarts. Lined and layered as described it would serve several as a cold entrée, which gives some idea of how many small eggs the dish consumed.
- What the flourishes meanThe truffle is cut into stars purely for effect, and the chervil is used chiefly as a leaf rather than for flavour — its lacy shape reads well through clear jelly. The alternating direction of each overlapping ring is what produces the herringbone effect when the mould is turned out.
Plovers' eggs were a luxury of the late spring table in Britain, gathered from lapwing nests in the fields of East Anglia and Holland and sold by the dozen in London shops from March onward. They were nearly always served hard-boiled and cold, in moss-lined baskets or, as here, set in aspic, because the whole appeal lay in the small size and mottled shell. The à la Chartreuse label refers to the technique rather than to the Carthusian liqueur: a chartreuse in nineteenth-century kitchen French is a moulded dish whose lining is arranged in a deliberate geometric pattern, generally traced back to vegetable moulds attributed to the meatless cookery of the monks. It belongs among the set pieces meant to be looked at before they are eaten. The trade that supplied it is the reason the dish is now a historical curiosity: heavy commercial egg collecting, along with the draining and ploughing of damp grassland, helped drive the lapwing into the decline that eventually brought legal protection.