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Chicken in Jelly
I four pound chicken I small onion I bay leaf 3 whole cloves I blade of mace 14 box of gelatine 3 hard boiled eggs Salt and pepper to taste Clean the chicken and cut it up as for a fricassee. Put it on to cook with the onion, bay leaf, cloves, mace and pepper. Simmer slowly until the chicken is tender (about one and one-half hours if the chicken is young). When done, take it out, cut it from the bones in nice pieces, rejecting all the skin. Now put the bones and skin back into the kettle and simmer one hour longer. Cover the gelatine with a little cold water, and let it soak an hour. Put the chicken away until the next day. Add the gelatine to the liquor, stir over the fire about one minute, take from the fire and strain. Taste to see if properly seasoned-if not, add more salt and pepper-and stand it away also. There should be about one and a half pints of liquor when done. The next day, take all the fat from the top of the jelly, stand the jelly on the fire to melt, then pour into a square mould about a halfpint, and stand it on the ice to harden. When hard, put a layer of the chicken on top of the jelly, then slices of the hard boiled eggs, sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper, then more chicken, and so on until all is used. Now pour over this the remainder of the jelly, which should be cold, but still liquid, and should just cover the chicken. Stand away in a cold place over night. When wanted, turn carefully from the mould, and garnish with parsley.
A cold moulded chicken aspic built over two days, from the era when the icebox did the setting. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the quantities are printed in units that no longer mean anything at the store.
- The gelatine measure"1/4 box" (printed here as "14 box") refers to a boxed granulated gelatine of the period. Box sizes were not fully standardised, but the usual reading is the one-ounce box divided into four portions of about 1/4 oz, which makes a quarter box roughly one modern envelope, about 2 1/4 teaspoons, enough to set about 2 cups softly. For the 3 cups of liquor the recipe expects, use 1 1/2 to 2 envelopes unless your stock is rich enough to gel on its own.
- Test the stock firstSimmering the bones and skin a second hour is the point of the recipe: it draws enough natural gelatine that the added powder is only insurance. Chill a spoonful of the strained liquor before you commit. If it sets to a wobble by itself, use the smaller amount of gelatine; if it stays loose, use the larger.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg; a blade is one dried piece, about the aromatic weight of 1/4 teaspoon ground mace. Ground mace will cloud the jelly, so tie it in a scrap of muslin with the cloves and bay if you substitute.
- "A square mould about a halfpint"This is ambiguous as printed. A half-pint mould could not hold a four-pound chicken's meat plus three eggs; the phrase almost certainly describes the half-pint of jelly poured in as the first clear layer. Use a loaf tin or terrine of about 1 1/2 quarts.
- Cut it up as for a fricasseeJointed into serving pieces, bone in: two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, breast halved crosswise, back cut in two. The bones and skin go back into the pot afterwards, so do not discard them with the trimmings.
- Keep it cold, not merely coolThe chicken and the strained liquor both sit overnight before assembly. Refrigerate both, covered, as soon as they stop steaming rather than leaving them to cool slowly. Cooked poultry in stock is exactly the food that punishes a long slow cooldown.
- Temperature of the finishing jellyThe last of the jelly must be cold but still liquid, as the text says, or it will melt the set layers and float the eggs out of place. Stand the pan of melted jelly in a bowl of ice water and stir until it thickens to the consistency of unbeaten egg white, then pour.
- UnmouldingDip the mould in hot water for eight to ten seconds, run a thin knife round the edge, and invert onto a chilled platter. A moment too long in the water and the outer surface goes cloudy.
- YieldA four-pound bird gives about 1 1/2 lb of picked meat; the finished loaf serves six to eight as a cold main course with salad. It keeps three days refrigerated and does not freeze — the jelly weeps on thawing.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to a small genre of late nineteenth-century American cookbooks written for the months when a coal range made the kitchen unbearable and the household ate cold. The book is generally credited to Sarah Tyson Rorer of the Philadelphia Cooking School, whose whole teaching career ran on this kind of economy: one chicken, simmered once for meat and again for its bones, yielding both the dish and the jelly that holds it. Moulded chicken in aspic came into American cooking from the French kitchen, where chaud-froid and jellied galantines were formal work, but commercial granulated gelatine, sold ready-boxed, put it within reach of a cook who had no time to clarify a calf's-foot stock. The recipe's rhythm, cook one day and mould the next, is dictated entirely by the icebox: chilling was slow, overnight, and done in whatever corner held the ice.