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Reform Chips
Reform chips are used for garnishing purposes. They have a good appearance when placed in the centre of a dish of cutlets. Take equal quantities of cooked ingredients of different colours, such as pink ham, hard-boiled white of egg, black truffles, red carrots, or green pickles. Cut these into thin shreds about an inch long, make them quite hot, toss them lightly to mix them, and serve.
A garnish rather than a dish: fine julienne of contrasting cooked ingredients, warmed and piled in the middle of a platter of cutlets. The whole point is colour and knife work.
- "Chips" here means julienneNothing is fried and no potato is involved. Cut everything into matchsticks about an inch long, as fine and as even as you can manage — the garnish is judged on its appearance.
- Everything goes in cookedHam, hard-boiled egg white, cooked carrot, truffle and pickle all arrive ready to eat. They need only to be heated through, so warm them in a little butter over low heat or in a covered dish set over hot water for a minute or two.
- Do not let it colourEgg white toughens and squeaks if it gets hot, gherkin goes limp, and carrot loses its edge. Toss lightly and briefly, then serve at once.
- TrufflesFresh black truffle is a luxury purchase; a small jarred preserved truffle, drained and cut fine, gives the black note the garnish is built around. Dark-cooked mushroom or a strip of black olive is a plausible visual stand-in, though not the same flavour.
- "Green pickles"In a British book of this period this most likely means gherkins in vinegar rather than a sweet pickle. Drain and pat dry or the vinegar will bleed into the other colours.
- Balance of coloursEqual quantities, and the more contrasting colours the better: pink, white, black, orange, green. The recipe offers its five ingredients as examples rather than a fixed set.
- QuantityThe recipe gives no amounts; judge by eye, allowing enough finished julienne to make a small mound in the centre of the dish.
The name points to the Reform Club in Pall Mall, where Alexis Soyer was chef from the late 1830s, and to côtelettes à la Reforme — crumbed lamb cutlets with a sharp brown sauce — that is generally credited to him. The julienne garnish of ham, tongue, hard-boiled egg white, truffle, gherkin and mushroom is the signature of that dish, and by the time Cassell's was compiling its dictionary the shreds had become a standard item of the professional repertoire, detachable from the cutlets and worth a short entry of their own. It belongs to a period when a cook's reputation rested partly on the look of the platter: cold, contrasting, precisely cut garnishes were the visible proof of a trained kitchen, and knife work of this kind was drilled rather than improvised.