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Aspic Jelly Salad
Serve small molds of aspic jelly on crisp lettuce leaves. Garnish with curled celery; marinate with French dressing, and garnish with mayonnaise.
This is an assembly note rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have aspic jelly set in individual molds, made from the book's own stock-and-gelatine formula. What it does specify is the plating, and the order of operations there is worth reading carefully.
- What the aspic isIn a 1907 kitchen this means clarified veal, chicken or fish stock set with gelatine, seasoned with vinegar or lemon, and cleared with egg white. A modern equivalent is about 1 tablespoon (1 envelope) of powdered gelatine per 2 cups of well-flavoured, strained stock; a little more if the molds must stand at room temperature on a buffet.
- Small moldsThese were probably individual timbale or dariole molds, on the order of 1/3 to 1/2 cup. Silicone muffin cups or small ramekins work; dip the mold in hot water for three or four seconds and invert onto the leaf rather than running a knife round the edge, which tears the surface.
- The marinating is for the lettuceThe marinating probably refers to the lettuce -- the instruction is ambiguous, but the likelier reading is that the French dressing goes on the greens rather than the jelly, since dressing tends to slide off a set aspic. Dress the lettuce, set the mold on top, then add the mayonnaise.
- Curled celeryCut celery ribs into 2-inch lengths, slice each lengthwise into fine strips leaving one end intact, and drop into ice water for 20 to 30 minutes. The strips fan and curl. Dry them before they touch the plate.
- French dressing, 1907 senseTypically about three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and pepper, unemulsified and shaken or whisked just before use. Period versions vary, and some include mustard or paprika.
- MayonnaiseThe original assumes a hand-made mayonnaise with raw yolk. If the salad will stand at a warm table, use pasteurised eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice so it will drop cleanly from a spoon.
- Timing and yieldUnmold at the last moment and keep the plates cold; a gelatine aspic softens fairly quickly once it is out of the refrigerator. Two cups of jelly gives roughly six small molds, or six first-course servings.
Aspic salads sit at the point where the elaborate French garde-manger work of the nineteenth century met the American home kitchen, and commercial gelatine is what let them cross over. Once granulated gelatine could be bought by the packet, a cook no longer needed to spend a day boiling calves' feet to get a clear, firm jelly, and moulded savoury salads spread rapidly through community and company cookbooks in the 1890s and 1900s. Lowney's book, published by a chocolate manufacturer, is very much of that commercial moment, and its salad chapter reflects the era's taste for cold, composed, visually neat courses served on lettuce with a spoonful of mayonnaise. The word aspic is generally traced to the French for the asp, usually explained by the jelly's cool, glossy, snake-skin look, though that etymology is traditional rather than settled.