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Aspic of Chicken
Once the rule for Aspic jelly: 1 hard boiled egg 3 slices cooked beet 3 slices cooked carrot 1 cup Mayonnaise 3 cups very tender cold chicken 1 cup cooked vegetables 1/2 bunch celery Rinse a three pint border mould in cold water and pour in semi-congealed aspic to cover the bottom, set in ice water to become firm, and as soon as they can be laid on without sinking garnish with the prepared vegetables, bits of parsley and egg. Pour on more of the jelly and harden again. Sprinkle the bits of meat well with salt, pepper and celery salt and mix with them some of the cool aspic. As soon as the vegetables are firmly bedded in their layer fill the mould nearly to the top with the chicken, pour over more liquid aspic to make sure that every crevice is filled, and set to cool again. Lastly, fill brim full with aspic and set on ice for ten or twelve hours. At serving time turn on a flat dish, fill the center with celery finely shaved and dressed with the Mayonnaise. Garnish with delicate celery leaves, laying a star of red beet on each.
A cold moulded entrée that depends entirely on timing: the aspic has to be caught at the moment it is thick but still pourable. Everything else is assembly.
- The missing component"Once the rule for Aspic jelly" appears to stand for one quantity of the aspic jelly recipe given elsewhere in the book. The amount needed is whatever fills a three-pint mould around the meat and vegetables, so rather less than three pints of clarified, seasoned stock jelly. Without it the ingredient list makes no sense on its own.
- If you set it with gelatinA 3-pint mould that must unmould cleanly and hold cut slices needs a firmer set than a spooned jelly: about 3 to 3 1/2 envelopes (roughly 3/4 oz) of powdered gelatin per quart of well-flavored stock. Rich homemade chicken or veal stock that already gels on its own will need less; test a spoonful on a cold saucer first.
- "Semi-congealed" is the hingeEach layer must be poured at the syrupy stage, thick enough that garnish sits on the surface instead of sinking, but still fluid enough to run into crevices. Keep the working aspic in a bowl over cool water and stir it now and then; if it sets hard, warm it gently and start the cooling over.
- Border mouldA ring mould — the hollow center is what gets filled with dressed celery at serving. A modern 6-cup (3-pint) metal ring pan matches the size called for.
- Cold chickenPoached breast and thigh meat from a whole bird, pulled or cut into neat pieces rather than shredded. Three cups is roughly the yield of a 3 lb chicken's worth of picked meat.
- Building in layers, not all at onceThe chilling between layers is not optional padding. Pour, set, garnish, pour again — if you add the chicken before the vegetable layer is firm, the pieces drift and the pattern is lost.
- The long chillTen to twelve hours on ice means overnight in the refrigerator. Keep the finished mould refrigerated until the moment it goes to the table; a gelatin loaf left standing in a warm room both slumps and becomes a food-safety problem.
- Turning outDip the mould briefly in warm — not hot — water, run a thin knife around the rim, invert onto a chilled flat dish. Leaving it in the water too long melts the decorated top layer, which is the face of the dish.
- YieldA 3-pint border serves eight to ten as a cold entrée or luncheon dish.
Aspic work of this kind was the showpiece of the cold table in American cooking between about 1880 and the First World War, borrowed wholesale from French garde-manger practice: clarified stock, a decorated bottom layer built upside down so the pattern reads right when the mould is turned out, and a border shape whose empty center invites a salad. Gold Medal Flour's cookbook was promotional literature issued by the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, and its recipes were pitched at the ambitious middle-class household rather than the professional kitchen — a dish like this let a cook with a good stockpot and a ring mould produce something that looked like hotel work. In nineteenth-century versions the stock itself often did the setting, drawn from calves' feet or veal knuckle; packaged powdered gelatin, commercially available in America from the later 1800s, is what made the technique routine enough to print for home readers.</historyplaceholder>