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Chaud-froid of Chicken
2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1 cup White Stock Yolk one egg 2 tablespoons cream 1 tablespoon lemon juice Salt and pepper 3/4 teaspoon granulated gelatine dissolved in one tablespoon hot water Aspic jelly Truffles 6 pieces cooked chicken, shaped in form of cutlets Make a sauce of butter, flour, and stock; add egg yolk diluted with cream, lemon juice, salt and pepper; then add dissolved gelatine. Dip chicken in sauce which has been allowed to cool. When chicken has cooled, garnish upper side with truffles cut in shapes. Brush over with aspic jelly mixture, and chill. Arrange a bed of lettuce; in centre pile cold cooked asparagus tips or celery cut in small pieces, marinated with French Dressing, and place chicken at base of salad.
Moulded Salmon, Cucumber Sauce 1 can salmon Yolks 2 eggs 1/2 tablespoon salt 1 1/2 tablespoons melted butter 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar 3/4 cup milk 1/2 tablespoon flour 1/4 cup vinegar 1 teaspoon mustard 3/4 tablespoon granulated gelatine Few grains cayenne 2 tablespoons cold water Remove salmon from can, rinse thoroughly with hot water, and separate in flakes. Mix dry ingredients, add egg yolks, butter, milk, and vinegar. Cook over boiling water, stirring constantly until mixture thickens. Add gelatine soaked in cold water. Strain, and add to salmon. Fill individual mould, chill, and serve with Cucumber Sauce II. Beat one-half cup heavy cream until stiff, add one-fourth teaspoon salt, a few grains pepper, and gradually two tablespoons vinegar; then add one cucumber, pared, chopped, and drained through cheese cloth.
A chaud-froid is a hot-made sauce served cold: the velouté is enriched, stiffened with gelatine, and set over cooked meat as an opaque coating. Everything here depends on temperature control, both of the sauce and of the chicken.
- The hinge: coat at the right momentThe sauce must cool until it is the consistency of heavy cream but not yet set. Too warm and it runs off the chicken in transparent streaks; too cool and it goes on in lumps. Stir over ice water and test on a chilled spoon.
- White stockAn unroasted chicken or veal stock, pale and lightly seasoned. Use a good low-sodium chicken stock, reduced slightly if it tastes thin, and season the sauce at the end since gelatine and chilling both mute salt.
- Granulated gelatineThree-quarters of a teaspoon is roughly a third of a modern 1/4-oz envelope. The recipe dissolves it directly in a tablespoon of hot water; stir the dissolved gelatine into the warm sauce off the heat, as prolonged boiling is generally held to weaken its setting power.
- The egg yolkThe yolk is diluted with cream and stirred into the thickened sauce; the recipe gives no further cooking time. Keep the sauce hot enough to cook the yolk through but short of a hard boil. It is there for richness and colour.
- Aspic jellyA clear, well-seasoned stock jelly used as a glaze. Brush it on when it is cold and syrupy, in two thin coats with a chill between, to seal the truffle garnish and give the gloss the dish is made for.
- TrufflesTruffles, often sold as canned peelings, were a common garnish in cookery of this period and are now costly. Thin rounds of black olive, blanched leek or tarragon leaves cut in shapes give a similar graphic effect.
- Shaping the chickenThe recipe asks only for six pieces of cooked chicken cut to a cutlet shape; cold breast meat is the obvious choice. Blot the pieces dry before dipping or the coating will slide.
- Yield and holdingSix pieces, so six servings as a light entree. Keep coated and glazed pieces refrigerated and serve within a day; the aspic softens and weeps if held longer.
Chaud-froid means simply "hot-cold," and the name records the method rather than the dish: a sauce built hot in the classical French manner, then set with gelatine and served chilled. It belonged to the age of the cold buffet and the elaborate luncheon table, when a cook's standing was judged partly on the smoothness of a coating and the neatness of truffle cutouts beneath a mirror of aspic. Its appearance in an American domestic cookery book alongside moulded salmon shows how thoroughly gelatine work had passed from professional kitchens into the middle-class household by the turn of the century, helped along by commercially packaged granulated gelatine, which spared the cook the long business of clarifying calf's-foot stock.