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Salmon Salad
Take the remains of broiled salmon, or broil some slices specially for the purpose. Divide these into neat pieces two inches square and half an inch thick. Season the pieces separately with oil, vinegar, pepper, and salt. Make a little clear aspic jelly, seasoned with pepper, salt, vinegar, and chopped ravigote (see RAVIGOTE). Wash some lettuces or any other suitable salad, and dry them perfectly. Divide the hearts into halves, and with them make a border round a dish. Decorate this border with picked prawns, hard-boiled eggs, beetroot, etc. Put a layer of salmon into the centre of the dish, and pour over it a little of the savoury aspic. When it is set, put another layer, and let this set again, and repeat the layers, diminishing the circles each time until at last they come to a point. Pour a little more jelly over all, place half a hard-boiled egg on this, and fasten in it the heart of a cabbage-lettuce. Keep it in a cool place till wanted.
A late-Victorian composed salad built as a chilled pyramid of salmon set in savoury jelly. The hinge is patience: each layer must be fully set before the next goes on, or the whole cone slumps.
- Aspic jelly'Clear aspic' of this period was generally a clarified fish or veal stock set with its own gelatine; the recipe itself gives no detail. A modern equivalent is well-flavoured fish stock set with about 1 tablespoon (8-10 g) powdered gelatine per Imperial pint (20 fl oz), which gives a jelly firm enough to hold shape at cool room temperature. Season it more sharply than tastes right warm; jelly mutes salt and acid once cold.
- RavigoteHere it means the herb mixture, not the sauce: chervil, tarragon, chives and parsley, finely chopped, sometimes with a little shallot. Use a scant tablespoon of the mix per cup of jelly and add it once the jelly has cooled to syrup consistency, or the herbs float to the top.
- Broiling means grillingIn a British book of this date "broil" is cooking over or under direct heat. Slices of salmon about half an inch thick need 3-4 minutes a side; take them off while the centre is just opaque, since they will be eaten cold and overcooked salmon turns dry and chalky in jelly.
- Picked prawnsCooked prawns peeled of shell and legs, in the small brown-shrimp or cold-water prawn range rather than large tiger prawns. Buy them cooked and peeled and pat them dry so they do not weep into the jelly.
- Building the coneChill the dish first. Give each layer 15-20 minutes in the refrigerator, and pour the jelly at the point where it is thickening but still pourable; hot jelly will melt the layer beneath and wash the salmon out of line.
- Drying the salad"Dry them perfectly" is not a flourish. Water on lettuce dilutes the jelly at the border and turns the whole dish cloudy and weepy. A salad spinner, then a tea towel.
- Keeping it cool"A cool place" meant a larder; use the refrigerator, and assemble no more than a few hours ahead. Cooked salmon, prawns and hard-boiled egg held at room temperature are the weak point of any aspic dish.
- YieldThe original gives none. A pound of cooked salmon with the garnishes serves four to six as a cold first course or light lunch.
Salads of this kind belong to the era of the *service à la russe* buffet, when a cold dish was expected to be architecture as much as food: a moulded centre, a ring of lettuce hearts, and decoration in the contrasting colours of beetroot, egg yolk and prawn. Aspic was the glue of that whole style of cooking, and it was cheap in a kitchen that already kept stock pots going — the gelatine came free from bones and fish trimmings rather than from a packet. The recipe's opening line, "take the remains of broiled salmon," places it firmly in the household economy that Cassell's addressed throughout: a large fish served hot one day reappeared cold and dressed the next, and the elaboration of the garnish was what distinguished a made dish from leftovers. Ravigote, from the French *ravigoter*, to revive or perk up, names exactly the job the herbs were given.