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Côtelettes Mignons à la
Tomate. (Cold Cutlets of Chicken or Game Forcemeat.) Ingredients.
One gill of Tomato Sauce (incorporated with Aspic).
One gill of Aspic Jelly.
Quarter of a pound of Chicken or Game Forcemcat.
One spoonful of Cream.
One Yolk of Egg and one hard-boiled Egg.
Seasoning. Parsley for garnishing.
One small Truffle.
Mask eight small cutlet moulds with aspic, work the forcemeat to a creamy substance with E2 the yolk of an egg and some aspic to make it set.
Ornament the bottom of the cutlets with hardboiled white of eggs and truffle. Mark some lines to imitate bones and fat of cutlets; line with the tomato sauce to imitate the fleshy part; fill up with the forcemeat previously prepared; cover the surface of each cutlet with tomato sauce. Place them on the ice for about half an hour; turn out carefully; dish up on a folded table-napkin or glass dish. Garnish with parsley, and serve.
A trompe-l'oeil cold entrée: forcemeat and tomato-tinted aspic moulded into little cutlet shapes, decorated to fake the bone and fat. The technique is sound Victorian garde-manger work, but the binding and holding of this particular version are not.
- Raw yolk, never cookedThe forcemeat is worked to a cream with a raw egg yolk and aspic, then only chilled. Nothing in the finished dish is ever brought to a temperature that would deal with Salmonella in the yolk, and the yolk is doing structural work, so it cannot simply be left out.
- Ambiguous forcemeat"Chicken or Game Forcemeat" in a book of this date may mean a cooked, pounded farce or a raw pounded one destined for poaching. Here it is never cooked at all, so if raw poultry or raw game is used the dish is served raw. That ambiguity alone is reason to work from a current recipe for cold mousse or chicken aspic instead.
- Half an hour on iceThirty minutes is barely enough to set aspic in a small mould, and it leaves a poultry and egg preparation sitting near room temperature while it is turned out, dished and garnished. Cold buffet work of this kind needs continuous refrigeration, which the original does not provide.
- GillsA British gill is 5 fl oz, roughly 140 ml: so about 140 ml of tomato sauce already slackened with aspic and about 140 ml of plain aspic jelly for lining, half a pint between the two.
- Cutlet mouldsSmall metal moulds in the outline of a lamb cutlet, of the kind used in professional cold work. Ovals or dariole moulds are the usual substitute, though then the whole conceit of imitation bone and fat is lost.
- "Mask" and "line"To mask is to coat the inside of the chilled mould with a thin film of aspic, swirled and set before decorating. The decoration goes in face-down, since the mould is inverted at the end, which is why the truffle and egg white are described as ornamenting the bottom.
- YieldEight small cutlet moulds.
Moulded cold entrées that imitated something else entirely were the signature of nineteenth-century garde-manger cookery, a line generally traced back to Carême's decorated cold work and carried into English professional kitchens through French-trained chefs and the cookery schools of the 1870s and 1880s. Côtelettes mignons were a stock item of that repertoire: forcemeat set with aspic in a cutlet-shaped mould, marked out with truffle and hard-boiled egg white so that a diner at a distance saw a neat little chop where there was none. The tomato sauce here is doing purely visual work, standing in for the red flesh against the pale forcemeat. Such dishes suited the era's long cold buffets and ball suppers, where everything had to be prepared in advance, look impressive under lamplight and be eaten off a plate held in one hand — and where the kitchen's supply of ice, not its stove, was the limiting factor.