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Fillet in Jelly
Make an Aspic Jelly and stand away to cool.
Trim and lard the fillet. Place one onion and one small carrot sliced, in the bottom of a baking pan, add one bay leaf, one teaspoonful of celery seed and a sprig of parsley. Place the fillet on top of these, add one pint of stock and one teaspoonful of salt, cover the pan with another the same size and bake in a quick oven for three-quarters of an hour. When done stand aside to cool. Put a layer of the jelly in the bottom of a mould, large enough to hold the fillet; then place it on the ice to cool, and when congealed and firm, place the fillet on it, larded side downward; now fill the mould with the remaining jelly, which must entirely cover the fillet and about three-quarters of an inch above it. Stand the whole in a cold place over night or for several hours. The fillet must not touch the mould, but be perfectly covered with the jelly. When cold and firm turn it out carefully on a cold meat dish. Garnish with hard boiled eggs, water cress and quarters of lemons. Bearnaise Sauce should be served with it.
BEEF a la MODE No. I Take from a round of beef a slice about four inches thick, weighing seven or eight pounds. Remove the bone. Bind the beef into good shape with a piece of new muslin or broad tape, sewing the ends tightly together. Cut deep gashes into the meat one inch apart, being careful not to cut all the way through. Mix a teaspoonful of salt, half a teaspoonful of black pepper, same of cinnamon, quarter of a teaspoonful of mace, the same of cloves, and rub them into the meat on both sides, sprinkling a little in each gash. Cut fat salt pork into pieces the size of the gashes, put one piece in each gash. Add to one cup of stale grated bread a small onion and a tablespoonful of parsley chopped very fine, moisten with vinegar. Now work a small portion of this forcemeat into the gashes by the side of the pork. Mix three tablespoonfuls of vinegar with three of olive oil, and moisten well both sides of the meat; let stand over night if possible. Then put two large tablespoonfuls of butter into a braising or baking pan; and when melted and hot, add one onion, one carrot and one turnip cut into slices; stir the whole until lightly browned, then add two tablespoonfuls of vinegar, two bay leaves, a sprig of parsley and two quarts of boiling water or stock; let the whole boil two minutes, then put in the beef and one knuckle of veal well cracked. If in a braising pan, put on the cover; if in a baking pan, turn over it another pan to keep in the steam. Put in the oven and bake slowly for six hours oven about 220° Fahr. When done, take out the meat and stand away to cool. Strain the liquor, add salt and pepper to taste, and turn into a square pan to harden. This will make a jelly of a bright amber color. Serve the meat cold with squares of this amber jelly around it. Garnish with small button radishes cut into tulips, and parsley. Serve also in a separate dish Sauce Tartare.
This will keep one week if placed in a cold dry refrigerator. BEEF a la MODE No. 2 3 pounds from upper side of round 1/4 teaspoonful of black pepper 1/4 teaspoonful of nutmeg 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley 1/2 teaspoonful of allspice 1 teaspoonful of salt 1/4 teaspoonful of cloves 1 cup of bread crumbs 1 tablespoonful of butter ¼ pound of larding pork Make gashes in the meat about two inches long, and almost through it. Mix the spices, salt and pepper. Mix the bread crumbs, parsley and the butter (melted) together. Rub the meat on both sides with the spices, and put the remainder in the gashes. Fill the gashes nearly full with the bread crumbs. Cut the larding pork into pieces the size of the gashes, and work them down with the crumbs. Now tie the meat around with a piece of twine to hold in the filling. Finish the same as Beef à la Mode No. 1. PRESSED MEAT No. I 1 quart of pieces of cold, cooked meat 1/2 teaspoonful of cloves ¼ teaspoonful of black pepper 1 cup of boiling stock 1 teaspoonful of cinnamon 1 teaspoonful of allspice ¼ teaspoonful of mace Salt to taste Mix all the ingredients together, then press into a square mould and stand in a cold place to cool. When cold, turn it from the mould, cut it into slices, and serve. For this you can use any meat left from soups.
PRESSED MEAT No. 2 6 pounds of the brisket of beef 1/4 teaspoonful of ground cloves ¼ teaspoonful of ground mace ½ teaspoonful of ground cinnamon ½ teaspoonful of ground allspice 1/4 teaspoonful of black pepper 1 teaspoonful of salt Dash of cayenne 3 tablespoonfuls of vinegar Cover the meat with cold water and simmer for five hours. When done, take out and stand away to cool. Boil the liquor until reduced to a pint. When the meat is cold, remove the bones, and cut it into small pieces; add to it all the spices, salt and pepper, and press into a square basin or mould. Now add the vinegar to the pint of boiling liquor, pour it over the meat and stand in a cold place for twelve hours. Then loosen it from the sides of the mould and turn it carefully out, and it is ready to serve.
A cluster of cold-meat set pieces from the summer table: a larded beef fillet suspended in aspic, two versions of beef à la mode, and two pressed meats. All of them depend on gelatin and a genuinely cold larder, which is where a modern kitchen actually has the advantage.
- The hinge: build the jelly in layersThe fillet must be encased, not merely coated. Set a base layer firm before the meat goes in, keep the meat off the sides of the mould, and finish with about three-quarters of an inch of jelly over the top. Pouring warm jelly around a warm fillet in one go will melt the base and leave the meat sitting on the metal, where it will stick and tear on unmoulding.
- "Fillet" and lardingThis is the whole beef tenderloin, trimmed of silverskin and chain. Larding means threading strips of chilled pork fatback through the lean with a larding needle; if you have no needle, bard the fillet with sheets of fatback tied on and remove them before it goes into the mould. Note the instruction to lay the larded side downward, since that face becomes the top when turned out.
- Oven temperaturesA "quick oven" is usually reckoned at about 400-450F. Three-quarters of an hour at that heat, in a covered pan with a pint of stock, will take a whole fillet well past pink, which suits aspic work: firm meat that slices cleanly cold. The 220F given for Beef a la Mode No. 1 is unusually precise for a book of this period and lower than many home ovens will hold reliably; 250F in a covered braising pan is the practical floor.
- Aspic jellyThe book assumes you have made its aspic jelly separately, from stock clarified in the usual way. A strong homemade beef or veal stock that sets firm when chilled will work; if it only just trembles, reinforce it with about 1 tablespoon of powdered gelatin per pint. The knuckle of veal in Beef a la Mode No. 1 is largely there for gelatin, and it is why that braising liquor sets into the "amber jelly" without any added help.
- "Place it on the ice"The ice box is your refrigerator. Setting a layer takes roughly 30-45 minutes at refrigerator temperature; the recipe allows overnight or several hours for the final set, and the longer rest gives the cleaner turn-out. Unmould by dipping the mould in warm -- not hot -- water for a count of five and inverting onto a chilled platter.
- Cover the pan with another panAn economical braising lid. A tight-fitting lid or a double layer of foil crimped over the rim does the same job, which is to keep the pint of stock from evaporating and to steam-braise rather than roast.
- Pressed Meat No. 1 wants careA quart of cold cooked odds and ends bound with only one cup of boiling stock is barely reheated. Bring the stock properly to the boil, mix and press at once, and get the mould into the refrigerator without a long stand at room temperature. Eat it within two or three days rather than the week the author allows for the à la mode.
- Weighting the pressed meatsNeither recipe says so, but "press" means press: a plate cut to the inside of the mould with two or three pounds on top while it sets (twelve hours in No. 2). Without weight the slices are more likely to crumble.
- Yield and serviceThe fillet in jelly serves 8–10 as a cold course; Beef à la Mode No. 1, at seven or eight pounds, serves 12 or more and is meant to be sliced from over several days. Béarnaise with a cold fillet is a period touch — serve it just warm, or substitute a cold sauce tartare as the à la mode recipes do.
Cold meat in jelly is the signature of the pre-refrigeration summer table, and this book's whole premise — dishes for hot weather — explains why a chapter on meats is dominated by things served cold from a mould. Aspic was the fashionable end of the tradition, borrowed wholesale from French professional cookery along with its béarnaise and its tulip-cut radishes, while bœuf à la mode — literally beef in the fashion, a larded, spiced, long-braised round whose liquor sets to jelly on its own — had been an English and American household standard since the eighteenth century. The heavy sweet spicing here, cinnamon and mace and cloves rubbed into beef, is a survival of much older cookery that had largely retreated from hot dishes but hung on in preserved and pressed meats, where the spice is often said to have worked against a long spell in the larder, though such heavy spicing is probably better read as a matter of taste and prestige. The pressed meats at the end are the frugal cousins: the same technique applied to soup scraps, since anything gelatinous enough to set could be turned out, sliced and put on the table looking deliberate.