Aspic
Cucumbers in Aspic - Eggs in Aspic - Aspic of Pâté de Foie Gras. - Cover bottom of mold with Aspic Jelly Mixture; decorate with truffles cut in fancy shapes and foies gras cut in thin slices. Cover this with liquid aspic; when hard place roasted quail on jelly, cover with liquid jelly and chill. Decorate sides of top layer with hard-cooked white of egg cut in crescents. Unmold, garnish with cress, and serve with mayonnaise.
This is an assembly job rather than a cooking one: the heading lumps three cold entrées together, and the instructions given belong to the last of them. Everything depends on building the mold in thin, fully set layers.
- The hinge: set each layer before adding the nextPour no more than about a quarter inch of liquid aspic at a time and refrigerate until firm to the touch before adding decoration or the next pour. Adding warm jelly to a soft layer dislodges the truffle cutouts and clouds the finish; adding it to a very cold set layer in too thick a pour makes the tiers separate on unmolding.
- Aspic Jelly MixtureThe book assumes you have made its separate aspic recipe — a clarified, well-seasoned stock set with gelatine. A modern equivalent is roughly 1 tablespoon (1 envelope, about 7 g) powdered gelatine per 2 cups of strong clarified stock; use nearer 1 envelope per 1½ cups if you want a jelly firm enough to unmold and slice cleanly. Keep the working batch just liquid in a bowl over warm water, not hot — gelatine begins to soften not far above blood heat, and warm jelly will melt the layer beneath.
- "Foies gras" and pâtéThe spelling is period. What is meant is a firm pâté or bloc de foie gras that will slice cleanly when very cold — mousse-style foie gras is too soft to cut in shapes. Chill it hard and cut with a thin knife dipped in hot water.
- TrufflesCanned black truffles in their own liquor were a familiar store item when this book appeared, and more readily come by for decorative work than they are now. Whole preserved truffles are today a considerable luxury; thin rounds of black olive, or a dark mushroom cap, read the same way in a mold and cost nothing.
- QuailFarmed quail are widely sold, usually 4-5 oz each. Roast them, cool completely, and either use them whole in a large mold or bone the breasts for a mold you intend to slice. A whole bird in aspic is very hard to serve neatly at table.
- The moldAny 1- to 1.5-quart metal mold or loaf pan works; metal chills faster and releases better than glass. Do not oil it — oil clouds the jelly. Total chilling time for a mold of this size is 4 to 6 hours, or overnight.
- UnmoldingDip the mold in warm water for 5 to 10 seconds, no longer, then invert onto a chilled platter. If it resists, run a thin knife around the top edge rather than warming it again.
- The mayonnaiseThe original assumes hand-made mayonnaise with raw yolk, served cold alongside. If you make your own, use pasteurized eggs, particularly as this dish sits out on a buffet.
- Yield and serviceA 1.5-quart mold serves 6 to 8 as a cold entrée. Keep it refrigerated until the moment it goes to the table; left standing at room temperature, aspic will start to weep and lose its edges before long.
Aspic work of this kind was the showpiece end of the cold larder in the decades either side of 1900, when a chef's or a good cook's reputation rested partly on decorative moldwork — truffle cut in crescents and stars, whites of egg in geometric shapes, everything suspended in clear jelly. That it appears in a chocolate company's cookbook is less odd than it looks: Lowney's Cook Book was a general household manual issued as advertising by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, and general household manuals of the period were expected to cover the full range of formal service alongside plain family cooking. The technique itself descends from the older practice of setting meats in their own reduced, gelatine-rich cooking liquor; commercially packaged gelatine, widely available in America from the late nineteenth century, is what put molded aspic within reach of a household cook rather than only a hotel kitchen. Foie gras and truffles here signal aspiration more than everyday habit — this is the dish a book prints so the reader knows what the top of the repertoire looks like.