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Mustard and Cress (Little Aspic Jelly)
A little Aspic Jelly.
One ounce of Butter.
Lobster Spawn or Coral.
Parsley. Cut the rolls in halves, take out the bread and allow the crusts to dry. Mince up finely the prawns picked, the gherkin, six fillets of anchovies, and the white of an egg; put these in a basin and stir in the Tartare sauce. Put a little mustard and cress in the bottom of each roll and fill it up with the prawn mixture. Place a round of aspic on the top of each roll, and fasten the head of a prawn on the centre of each round of aspic with a little lobster butter, and ornament the edges of the aspic with it also. Dish up on small round dishes, garnish with parsley, and serve.
A cold savoury of hollowed dinner rolls filled with a prawn and tartare mixture, sealed with a disc of aspic. The printed ingredient list has clearly been cut short — only the aspic, butter, coral and parsley survive — so the quantities have to be read out of the method.
- What the list omitsThe method calls for rolls, picked prawns, a gherkin, six anchovy fillets, the white of an egg, tartare sauce and mustard and cress, none of which appear in the heading. The recipe gives no number of rolls and no quantities for any of these, so the amounts must be judged by eye: enough prawn mixture to bind, not to slacken.
- The hinge: dry the shellsThe hinge: dry the crusts -- "Allow the crusts to dry" is easy to skip and matters. Hollow the roll halves and leave them to dry until the crumb wall is crisp but not coloured; the recipe specifies neither oven nor time. A soft roll will go soggy within minutes of meeting the wet filling.
- Mustard and cressStill sold in Britain as a punnet of mixed white mustard and garden cress seedlings; snip at the base. Where it is not available, salad cress alone, or the finest pea shoots, gives the same peppery cushion.
- Lobster butterMade by pounding the coral (the roe, which turns scarlet on cooking) with the ounce of softened butter and passing it through a sieve. It is used here as edible glue and piping, not as a seasoning, so it must be smooth and firm enough to hold a shape — chill it briefly before piping.
- Aspic roundsSet the aspic in a shallow tray to a depth of about 5 mm and stamp rounds to match the diameter of the rolls. It needs to be a firm, well-clarified jelly; a soft-set aspic will slump on the bread.
- SaltSix anchovy fillets, a gherkin and commercial tartare sauce between them carry a great deal of salt. Mix and taste before any further seasoning is added.
- Raw egg whiteEgg white -- Almost certainly the minced white of a hard-boiled egg: the instruction is to "mince up finely", which a raw white will not take, and a raw white would only thin the mixture. Chopped hard-boiled white is a common feature of savoury and hors d'oeuvre work of this period.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe states no number of rolls; each roll is halved and each half filled, so the count is whatever the cook needs, served as a savoury course at the end of dinner or as items on an hors d'oeuvre tray. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep cold.
The savoury — a small, sharp, usually salty mouthful served after the sweet course — was a fixture of British formal dinners from the late nineteenth century until the Second World War, and books of "high class cookery" carried whole chapters of them. Anchovy, prawn, gherkin and aspic are the standard vocabulary of that course, engineered to be eaten in one or two bites without a knife. The hollowed roll used as an edible case is a professional trick of the same period, closely related to the croustade and the bouchée; it gave the cook a container that could be prepared in advance and filled at the last moment. Lobster coral, then a routine by-product of the fishmonger's slab, was prized for the scarlet colour it lends butter — an ornamental resource that has all but disappeared from domestic kitchens now that lobsters are rarely bought whole and undressed.