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Lemon Juice (Salt One and a half gills)
Salt. One and a half gills of Aspic Jelly.
Slice the onion thinly and fry it until colouring in the butter. Add flour and curry powder, and fry slightly, add tomato, and by degrees the stock, keeping the sauce thick. Add seasoning and cream. When sauce is well cooked wring through tammy, stir into liquid aspic jelly.
When cold mask the joints of chicken carefully and well, decorate with truffle and red chillies, if liked, baste with aspic. Dish up high on rice socle. Arrange a border of well-cooked rice (cooked in chicken stock) round base of dish, and some fancy shapes of aspic.
This is a chaud-froid of chicken — cooked joints masked in a curry-flavoured sauce set with aspic, served cold on a rice base. The printed page begins mid-way through the ingredient list, so the quantities for onion, butter, flour, curry powder, tomato, stock and cream are missing; the method is complete and workable if you build the sauce by eye.
- A gill5 fl oz imperial (not the same as a US half-cup, which is 4 fl oz). One and a half gills is therefore 7½ fl oz, roughly 210 ml of liquid aspic.
- Aspic jellyA clarified, well-seasoned stock jelly, in this period set with the natural gelatine of veal knuckle and calf's foot and clarified with egg white. Modern stock rarely sets firmly on its own; powdered gelatine bloomed and dissolved into strong clarified chicken stock does the same job.
- Wring through a tammyA tammy is a worsted or fine woollen straining cloth; the sauce was twisted in it between two people to force it through. A fine chinois pressed with a ladle, or a sieve after blending, achieves the same smoothness.
- The hinge: sauce temperatureThe curry sauce and the aspic are combined while the aspic is still liquid, and the mixture then brought down (conventionally by stirring in a bowl set over ice) to the consistency of pouring cream; the recipe itself says only "when cold". Too warm and it slides off the chicken; too cool and it sets in lumps. Mask in two or three thin coats rather than one thick one.
- SocleA raised base or plinth to give the dish height. Here it is made of firmly packed rice cooked in chicken stock, moulded and chilled; in grander kitchens socles were carved from rice paste, suet or even wax for display pieces.
- Truffle and chilliesCut into thin decorative shapes, dipped in half-set aspic and applied to the masked surface, then sealed with a final basting of aspic. Blanched leek green, sweet red pepper or black olive stand in perfectly well for the visual effect.
- Chilling and holdingEverything is assembled cold and eaten cold. Keep the finished dish refrigerated and bring it out shortly before serving — the aspic softens and weeps at room temperature, and a poultry dish should not stand out for hours.
- YieldThe joints of one chicken, dressed this way, serve four to six as an entrée with the rice border.
Chaud-froid — literally "hot-cold" — is the classic technique of cooking a bird or fish hot, then serving it cold under a set sauce, and it belongs to the display cookery that dominated grand British and French service; the technique itself is generally traced to the later eighteenth century, and it remained current into the Edwardian years. The curry version reflects how thoroughly commercial curry powder had settled into the British repertoire by then: not an attempt at Indian cookery but a familiar flavouring for the kitchen. The rice socle and the border of aspic shapes are pure buffet craft, meant for a cold table where the dish would be looked at before it was eaten. Books of this class assumed a cook with time, a stockpot always going, and a tammy cloth and a pair of hands to help wring it.