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Six Sheets of French Gelatine
One gill of Aspic Jelly.
Two tablespoonfuls of Cream.
Warm up the Espagnole Sauce, add the sherry, soak the gelatine, squeeze out the moisture, add it to the sauce with the melted aspic jelly, let it boil for a few minutes, skim well, and pass through a tammy-cloth; let it cool a little and add the cream, season if necessary, and use as directed.
This is a chaud-froid brune — a brown sauce set with gelatine and aspic so that it will cling to cold meat or poultry in a smooth coat. Note that the printed ingredient list is incomplete: the quantities of Espagnole and sherry appear in the preceding column of the original book, so treat what follows as method rather than a full formula.
- A gillIn a British book of this date a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, or a little over half a US cup. The American gill is 4 fl oz; the difference is not critical here.
- Six sheets of gelatineVictorian French sheet gelatine was not standardised, and modern leaf gelatine is sold in grades (bronze through platinum) of differing strength. Six sheets is roughly 10-12 g of modern leaf; judge by testing a spoonful on a cold plate rather than by count.
- Soak and squeezeCold water, until floppy, then wrung out hard. Any water carried in thins the sauce and weakens the set, which matters when the whole point is a coating that holds.
- Do not boil it long"Boil for a few minutes" is meant to clear and reduce, but prolonged boiling degrades gelatine and the sauce will slump on the joint. Bring it up, skim, and take it off.
- Tammy-clothA worsted straining cloth, wrung between two people to force the sauce through. A fine chinois lined with damp muslin does the same job with less drama.
- Cream goes in off the heatThe instruction to cool a little first is the hinge of the recipe. Cream stirred into a boiling, sherry-acidulated brown sauce can curdle, and a broken sauce is troublesome to bring back.
- Working temperatureCool over ice, stirring, until the sauce coats the back of a spoon and holds a line drawn through it. Too warm and it runs off; too cool and it sets in ridges.
Chaud-froid — "hot-cold" — is a sauce made hot and served cold, the mainstay of the nineteenth-century buffet table, where cold poultry, game and fish were masked in a glossy coat and decorated with cut truffle, tarragon leaves and egg white before being glazed with clear aspic. The brown version, built on Espagnole, was used for game and dark meats; a white one on velouté or béchamel served chicken and fish. The invention of the technique is traditionally credited to eighteenth-century French kitchen lore, though the elaborate form here belongs to the era of Carême and Escoffier and their English imitators. Its appearance in a book of "high class" recipes is telling: imported French sheet gelatine, a stockpot deep enough to yield both Espagnole and aspic, and the patience for two coats and a decoration all assumed a staffed kitchen cooking for a table where food was looked at before it was eaten.