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No-name Salad
Make a mayonnaise, a small amount of aspic and a French dressing. Flake any cold cooked fish, either of one kind or mixed, and lay for an hour in a deep plate sprinkled with oil and vinegar.
Line a plain, flat-topped mold with the just liquid aspic by pouring in a small quantity and turning and tipping the mold in a bed of cracked ice till every part is thickly coated; then set firmly and evenly in the ice. Ornament the bottom (which will be the top) with a round of truffle in the center and a dozen or so shrimps radiating from it, and decorate the sides with a ring of shrimps alternating with slices of truffle; set these with a very little more aspic. Add to the mayonnaise about its own bulk of the jelly and put in the mold a layer of the mixture, then one of the fish just as you lift it from the marinade; strew with capers, add another layer of sauce, then fish, till the mold is full; garnish with a wreath of cauliflower branches and water cress well seasoned with the French dressing when turned out for the table.- Anne Warner.
This is a moulded fish salad in the grand style, and it depends entirely on temperature control: the aspic must be liquid enough to pour but cold enough to grip the mould wall on contact. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: aspic at the right temperature"Just liquid" means the jelly is on the point of setting, syrupy rather than watery. Poured warm it slides off the mould and pools; poured too cool it sets in lumps. Have a bowl of ice water and a bowl of warm water beside you so you can move the aspic back and forth.
- Making the aspicPeriod aspic is well-flavoured fish or veal stock, clarified and set with gelatin. For a coating jelly that holds decoration, allow about one envelope (2 1/4 tsp) of powdered gelatin per cup of cold stock; that is firmer than a table jelly and deliberately so.
- French dressingThe recipe gives no formula. In this period the term generally meant a plain vinaigrette of oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, commonly around three parts oil to one of vinegar.
- Mayonnaise and raw eggThe mayonnaise is never cooked and the finished salad sits out on a table. Use pasteurized eggs, or a good bought mayonnaise, and keep the mould refrigerated until the moment it goes to the table.
- Marinating the fishAn hour in oil and vinegar in a deep plate should happen in the refrigerator, not on the counter. Lift the flakes out and let them drain a moment; excess marinade will keep the aspic layers from binding.
- The ice bed, modernisedA bowl of cracked ice with a little water in it chills faster and more evenly than ice alone, and the refrigerator will do the job between layers. Give each layer 15-20 minutes to set before adding the next, or the decoration will drift.
- TruffleFresh truffle is a luxury here; preserved and tinned black truffle was widely sold at the time and still works. Black olive rounds give a similar graphic dark-on-pale effect if truffle is out of reach.
- UnmouldingDip the mould in warm water for five seconds, dry it, and invert onto a chilled platter. The decorated bottom becomes the top, which is the whole point of the elaborate first stage.
- YieldThe recipe states no mould size or number of servings; a mould of about a quart would serve six to eight as a lunch or supper course. Allow several hours in the cold for it to set through before turning out.
Moulded fish salads like this one belong to the high period of American "fancy" cookery, when the ice-chest and commercial gelatin let a home cook attempt effects previously confined to professional kitchens: the chaud-froid, the lined and decorated mould, the truffle medallion. Aspic-lined moulds were French restaurant technique, and are generally said to have reached domestic readers through the cooking schools and magazines of the 1880s and 1890s. The dish answers to no classical name at all, since it is neither a mayonnaise de poisson nor a salade russe nor anything else in the escoffian canon, and its attribution to a named contributor is typical of the period, when magazines built their cookbooks from readers' and writers' signed submissions. It is also, practically speaking, a leftovers dish: any cold cooked fish, "either of one kind or mixed," dressed up until nobody could tell.