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Salads: Remove
Cut the potatoes into half-inch dice. Remove the seeds from the pepper and chop fine. Mix the vine- SALADS gar, water, sugar, salt, and pepper.
Put a layer of potatoes into the salad dish, then a layer of chopped pepper, and sprinkle over it a tablespoonful oil. Put in another layer of potatoes and peppers, add the other tablespoonful oil, and pour over all the vinegar. Set in the refrigerator for fifteen minutes to marinate. -MARIA WILLETT HOWARD.
Chicken Molded with Mayonnaise.
Re- Stew a 4-pound chicken in 2 quarts cold water, add 4 slices carrot, 1 onion stuck with 8 cloves, 2 stalks celery, bit bay leaf, ½ teaspoonful peppercorn, 1 teaspoonful salt. Bring quickly to the boil till tender. Remove meat from bones and chop (there should be 2½ cupfuls. duce stock to 1 cupful, cool, soak 1½ teaspoonfuls granulated gelatin in 2 teaspoonfuls cold water and dissolve in stock which has been reheated; add to meat, season with salt, pepper, celery salt, and onion juice. Pack in buttered -pound baking-powder tins and chill. Remove from molds, cut in rounds, put on lettuce, and garnish with mayonnaise. FANNIE M. FARMER.
Tomato-and-Pea Salad.
Two salads run together here: the tail end of a layered potato-and-pepper salad, and Fannie Farmer's chicken in aspic, unmolded and dressed with mayonnaise. Both are period recipes that assume a cook already knows the proportions.
- The hinge: don't boil the chicken hard"Bring quickly to the boil till tender" is bad advice as written. Bring the pot to a boil, then drop to a bare simmer at about 180F for 60-75 minutes; a rolling boil makes the breast stringy and clouds the stock you will later set with gelatin.
- Reducing the stockTwo quarts down to one cupful is a serious reduction, and it is the point of the dish -- that concentrated stock is what carries the flavour once it is chilled and diluted by nothing. Strain it through a fine sieve or cloth before reducing so the finished mold is clear.
- Gelatin proportionsOne and a half teaspoons of granulated gelatin is about two-thirds of a modern 2¼-teaspoon packet, and in a single cupful of stock that is a firm ratio by today's guidance, though the 2½ cupfuls of chopped meat carry moisture of their own. Note also that two teaspoons of cold water is very little to bloom the gelatin in -- allow more.
- Baking-powder tinsThese were straight-sided tin cylinders sold full of baking powder and often kept and reused afterwards. Any straight-sided can, a set of ramekins, or a small loaf pan lined with plastic wrap gives the same result; the cylinder is what produces the neat rounds.
- Onion stuck with clovesEight cloves in one onion is a lot by modern taste and will dominate a reduced stock. Four is plenty. "Bit bay leaf" means a piece of one leaf, not a whole one.
- UnmoldingDip the tin in hot water for five to ten seconds and run a thin knife round the edge. Chill the mold at least four hours, preferably overnight -- a soft-set aspic turned out too early will slump.
- The potato saladThe two tablespoonfuls of oil and the vinegar-water-sugar mixture are dressing a quantity of potatoes the surviving text does not state; a pound of waxy potatoes, diced, is a reasonable scale. Fifteen minutes in the refrigerator is the bare minimum -- dressing the potatoes warm and giving them an hour absorbs far more.
- YieldThe chicken mold gives six to eight rounds, enough for a light lunch course. It is a made dish for a cold table, not a main course.
Both contributions carry names that would have sold the book: Fannie Merritt Farmer of the Boston Cooking School, whose 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book made level measurements standard in American kitchens, and Maria Willett Howard, a cooking teacher and author associated with Farmer's circle. Molded meat in aspic was near the centre of respectable American entertaining between about 1890 and 1930: it used up boiled fowl, it could be made the day before, it sliced cleanly for a buffet, and it showed off the newly reliable packaged gelatin that had replaced the long labour of boiling down calf's foot. The baking-powder tin as a mold is the domestic-economy instinct of the period in miniature -- the tin was already in the house, and the shape it gave was exactly the neat round that a plate of lettuce and mayonnaise called for.