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Sauce Chaudfroid Verte
(Green Chaudfroid Sauce.) Ingredients.
Half a pint of rich Béchamel Sauce.
One gill of Aspic Jelly.
Half a gill of Purée of Green Peas.
A teaspoonful of Lemon Juice.
Five to six sheets of French Gelatine.
Half a gill of Cream.
Two to three drops of Spinach Greening.
One dessertspoonful of liquid Meat Glaze.
See Proceed as for Sauce Chaudfroid Blanche. that the purée of peas is well reduced before it is added to the sauce. The addition of spinach greening may be omitted if the sauce is sufficiently tinted with the peas. Add the meat glaze last of all.
A coating sauce for cold buffet work, meant to be spooned over chilled poached chicken, fish or eggs and left to set to a pale green enamel. Almost everything about it depends on temperature control rather than flavour.
- The hinge: coat at the right momentChaudfroid sauce must be used when it has cooled to the point of just coating the back of a spoon and no further. Too warm and it runs off in streaks; too cool and it sets in lumps. Keep the bowl over ice water, stir slowly, and have the items to be coated already cold and dry.
- Gills and pintsThese are imperial measures. A gill is 5 fl oz, so half a pint of Bechamel is 10 fl oz (1 1/4 cups) and each half gill is 2 1/2 fl oz (about 1/3 cup, scant). Added up, the ingredients come to something over a pint of finished sauce.
- Sheets of French gelatineLeaf gelatine, and the count is unreliable now: sheet size and strength were not standardised before modern bloom grading, so a period sheet cannot be equated with a modern silver or gold leaf. Weigh instead, and remember the aspic jelly is already gelatine-set, so err low and test a spoonful on a cold plate before committing the batch.
- Aspic jelly and liquid meat glazeAspic here is a clarified, well-gelled meat or fish stock, not a packet product. Liquid meat glaze is glace de viande, stock reduced to a syrup; a good commercial demi-glace or reduced stock stands in. The book directs that it go in last of all, without saying why -- its dark colour would presumably tell against the pale tint.
- Spinach greeningVert d'epinards: spinach leaves pounded, the juice pressed out, warmed gently until the green solids coagulate, then strained and used as a dye. Two or three drops is the correct order of magnitude, and the book is right that a well-reduced pea puree may make it unnecessary.
- Reduce the pea puree hardAny water left in the puree dilutes the setting power and gives a slack, weeping coat. Cook it down to a thick paste, then sieve it so no skins show through the finish.
- Cold-buffet handlingCoated pieces sit at cool room temperature only as long as it takes to glaze them. Because both stock and dairy are involved and the food is never reheated, refrigerate as soon as the coat has set and serve the same day.
Chaudfroid, literally "hot-cold", is the classic French method of dressing a cooked dish that has been allowed to go cold: the sauce is made hot, then set with gelatine so it clings as a smooth opaque coat. Its invention is traditionally traced to an eighteenth-century French household where a dinner was interrupted and the dishes eaten cold to unexpected acclaim, a story generally repeated in the kitchen literature without documentation. What is documented is its central place in nineteenth-century grande cuisine, where Careme and later Escoffier codified white, brown and tinted versions as the foundation of buffet display. The green variant belongs to that decorative tradition, coloured with pea puree and spinach greening so that a chicken breast or a salmon fillet could be enamelled pale green, then finished with truffle or blanched tarragon leaves under a final wash of aspic. A book called High Class Cookery Recipes includes it because a professionally trained cook of the period was expected to send out a cold table, and a set sauce that could be piped, cut and patterned was as much a matter of drawing as of cooking.