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Chicken in Aspic
1 cooked, boned chicken 2 hard-cooked eggs parsley 2 quarts Aspic Jelly Mixture Select a mold large enough to hold chicken, cover bottom of mold with Aspic Jelly Mixture, and set on ice to. harden. Cut hard-cooked white of eggs into slices, cut yolk in slices, and stamp out small rounds with a vegetable cutter. Cut white of egg slices to resemble petals. Arrange on top of the hardened jelly in the form of daisies, taking up each piece on a needle and dipping in liquid jelly before placing. Cover with jelly mixture, adding by spoonfuls to avoid disturbing the design.
When hard place chicken on jelly, breast downward, cover with liquid jelly, and set away to harden.
The sides may be decorated in the same way as the bottom if more elaboration is desired. Unmold, place on bed of parsley or lettuce, and garnish with pimentos or olives.
Quail in Aspic - Pheasant in Aspic - Partridge in Aspic - Tongue in Aspic - Oysters in Aspic - Lobster in Aspic - Shrimp in Aspic - Chicken Breasts in Aspic - Tomatoes in
A layered, molded aspic of the kind that once anchored a cold buffet. Almost all the difficulty is in temperature control: the jelly must be liquid enough to pour and cold enough not to melt what is already set.
- The Aspic Jelly MixtureThis refers to a separate base recipe elsewhere in the book: a well-flavored, clarified stock set with gelatin, in this period usually clarified with egg white and shell. A strong homemade chicken stock set with powdered gelatin — roughly one envelope (about 2 1/4 tsp) per cup for a firm but sliceable set — or a commercial aspic powder, gives a workable equivalent.
- Two quarts is the mold, not the yieldTwo quarts is the jelly, not the finished yield -- Eight cups sounds enormous because it has to fill every gap around a whole boned bird. Choose a mold that holds the chicken with roughly an inch of clearance all around, and expect leftover jelly, which can be set flat in a pan and chopped for garnish.
- "Set on ice" means the refrigeratorThe original assumes an icebox or a bowl of cracked ice. Use the refrigerator, and keep the working bowl of liquid jelly in a pan of warm water so it stays pourable while the layers in the mold stay cold.
- Keep the pouring jelly barely warmThis is the hinge. Jelly poured hot will melt the set layer beneath and float the egg daisies out of position. It should be liquid but cool to the touch, and added a spoonful at a time over the back of a spoon.
- The needle trickA trussing needle or a metal skewer lifts each thin slice of egg white without breaking it; the dip in liquid jelly acts as glue. A pair of fine tweezers does the same job with less swearing.
- Breast downwardThe bird goes in upside down so that when the mold is inverted the breast sits uppermost, under the decorated layer. Boned chicken here means the whole bird boned and re-formed, not diced meat.
- UnmoldingDip the mold in warm — not hot — water for five to ten seconds, run a thin knife around the rim, and invert onto a chilled platter. A second dip is safer than a long first one.
- Holding and servingA large aspic needs at least six hours in the refrigerator and is better overnight. It is cooked chicken in stock, so keep it cold and return leftovers to the refrigerator promptly rather than letting the platter sit out through a long meal. A whole molded bird serves eight to ten as a cold entrée.
Aspic belonged to the professional cold kitchen of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when clarified gelatin stock was the medium for every showpiece on the buffet — the same impulse that produced chaud-froid sauces and mirrored serving platters. Lowney's Cook Book, compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company of Boston in the early 1900s, is remembered mainly for its chocolate work, but it carries a full entrée chapter modeled on French practice as taught in the Boston cooking schools. The list of variations trailing the recipe — quail, pheasant, partridge, tongue, oysters, lobster — shows how the method was understood: not a dish so much as a technique, applied to whatever cold cooked protein the household had. The daisies cut from egg white and yolk are a domestic echo of the elaborate garnishes a hotel garde-manger would have built, scaled down to a vegetable cutter and a needle. Gelatin's fall from fashion came later, with the mid-century vogue for sweet flavored gelatins that eventually made the savory original seem faintly ridiculous.