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Rice and Green Peas
Half an ounce of Gelatine.
Half a pint of Tomato Sauce.
A dessertspoonful of Red-currant Jelly.
Half a pint of Aspic Jelly.
Remove the skin and fat from a nice neck ot lamb; shorten the bones and saw off the chine bone, make the joint look trim and neat, put it in a sauté-pan with some sliced vegetables, season with pepper and salt, pour in half a pint of stock, and braise it in the oven for an hour or an hour and a half, according to the size of the neck. When the joint is cooked take it out of the pan and put it away to cool. Add the rest of the stock to the vegetables and let it reduce to half the quantity, skim it and strain it, return it to a stewpan and add half an ounce of gelatine dissolved, the tomato sauce, and red-currant jelly.
When this is nearly cold, but still liquid, sauce the cold lamb over with it, and when it is set, mask it with a thin layer of aspic jelly. Dish up on a bed of rice cooked in good stock, or on a large croûton of bread, and garnish round with little timbales of peas set in aspic.
This is a braised neck of lamb finished as a cold chaud-froid — the recipe's title and its filing under "Fish" are almost certainly a compositor's error, since nothing here involves rice, peas or fish beyond the pea timbales in the garnish. The hinge is temperature control: the coating sauce must be poured at the moment it is cool but still flowing, and the joint must be cold and dry when it goes on.
- The sauce windowSet the tomato-and-gelatine sauce over ice water and stir until it thickens to the consistency of pouring cream. Too warm and it runs off the meat in streaks; too cool and it sets in lumps as it leaves the ladle. Have the lamb chilled and blotted dry first, on a rack over a tray, and re-warm and re-cool the sauce for a second coat if needed.
- Half a pintAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 285 ml — not the American 8 oz cup. That applies to the tomato sauce, the aspic and the braising stock alike.
- GelatineHalf an ounce is about 14 g, roughly six or seven leaves of modern sheet gelatine (leaf weights vary, so check the packet) or two envelopes of powder. Victorian gelatine was less reliably standardised; if your aspic already contains gelatine, taste the reduced stock for body before adding the full amount, or the coating will be rubbery.
- The stock quantitiesThe recipe calls for half a pint of stock in the braise and then "the rest of the stock" for the sauce, without saying how much that is. Reckon on a pint or so more, reduced by half, to give the volume the tomato sauce and jelly are meant to join.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Braise covered at 325F (165C) for the stated hour to hour and a half; a best end or middle neck of lamb wants that gentle heat to become sliceable rather than stringy.
- The butcheryAsk for a best end of neck, chine bone removed and the rib bones shortened and cleaned — what a butcher now calls a French-trimmed rack. Doing it yourself with a saw is possible but the result rarely looks trim enough for a glazed cold dish.
- AspicAspic jelly here is a clear, well-seasoned stock set firm with gelatine. Commercial aspic powder works; a good clarified chicken or veal stock set with about 6 g gelatine per 250 ml is better. Brush the masking layer on cold-but-liquid, in two thin passes.
- Cold-work hygieneThe lamb sits at room temperature to cool, then takes several coats of sauce. Keep the total time out of refrigeration short — cool the joint uncovered in the fridge instead, and return it there between coats. Serve within a day.
- Yield and serviceA best end of six to seven cutlets serves four, cut into cutlets or served whole and carved at the table. The pea timbales are simply cooked peas set in aspic in small moulds or dariole cups, turned out around the base.
Coating cold cooked meat in a thickened, gelatine-set sauce and then glazing it with clear aspic is the classic chaud-froid treatment — "hot-cold," a sauce made hot and eaten cold — and it was the backbone of the late Victorian and Edwardian cold buffet, the food of ball suppers, race meetings and the ambigu table. Books of this kind, aimed at cooks in large private households and at the students of the cookery schools that multiplied in Britain after the 1870s, are full of such dishes because they could be finished hours ahead and looked impressive under lamplight without a kitchen brigade standing by. The redcurrant jelly is the English signature: lamb and mutton were expected to arrive with something sweet and sharp, and folding it into the coating sauce rather than serving it separately is a neat piece of economy.