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Quick Aspic Jelly
A quick and satisfactory aspic is made by dissolving three tablespoons Liebig's beef extract in one quart boiling water, seasoning well with lemon juice, onion juice, sherry wine, salt and pepper. Clear, add two tablespoons dissolved gelatine, and use the same as Aspic Jelly. Chicken Soufflé 1½ cups chicken ½ cup chicken stock cup mushrooms cup cream 2 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour salt and cayenne 1 teaspoon parsley cup bread crumbs 3 egg whites 3 egg yolks ¼ cup sherry Melt butter; add flour, seasonings, stock, cream, chicken, mushrooms, bread crumbs; cook ten minutes; add egg yolks and cut and fold in whites beaten until stiff, and the sherry. Bake in buttered baking dish forty minutes.
Serve immediately with or without Mushroom Sauce.
Two recipes run together here: a shortcut aspic built on commercial beef extract, and a chicken soufflé whose ingredient fractions were partly lost in printing. Both are workable, but the quantities need reading with care.
- Liebig's beef extractA dark, salty meat concentrate sold in jars; comparable products still on shelves include Oxo (the descendant of the Liebig company's own line) and the rival Bovril, plus similar meat pastes. Three tablespoons to a quart gives a strong, very salty base; taste before adding the salt the recipe calls for.
- "Clear"This means clarify: whisk in a lightly beaten egg white (shell included, if you like), bring the liquid barely to a simmer without stirring, let the raft form, then strain through a cloth. Skipping it leaves a cloudy aspic, which defeats the purpose.
- The gelatine is ambiguousTwo tablespoons "dissolved gelatine" could mean two tablespoons of dry granules softened in cold water, or two tablespoons of an already-made solution. Read as dry powder it is roughly two envelopes to a quart, i.e. about a tablespoon per two cups, which is close to the usual modern proportion for a firm moulded set; read as ready-made solution it would be far too little to set at all.
- Add gelatine after clarifyingThe order in the text matters. Clarify first, then stir the softened gelatine into the hot strained stock until fully dissolved; egg-white clarification will not work properly once the liquid is thickened with gelatine.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze a quarter onion in a garlic press. A teaspoon or two is plenty.
- The soufflé's missing fractionsSeveral quantities print as bare "cup" where a fraction has dropped out (mushrooms, cream, bread crumbs). A ½ cup reading for each is plausible against the four tablespoons of flour and three eggs, though ¼ cup would also fit; adjust by eye to a thick but foldable base.
- Oven temperatureUnstated, as usual. A baked soufflé of this kind wants a moderate oven, 350F, for the forty minutes given; the crumbs and the cooked base make it sturdier and slower than a classic cheese soufflé.
- Fold, then bake at onceThe base is cooked ten minutes and will be thick and hot. Let it cool a little before the yolks go in, fold the whites in two additions, and get it into the oven immediately — the sherry added last thins the mixture and the whites start deflating.
- YieldThe aspic makes about a quart, enough to coat or mould six to eight entrée portions. The soufflé serves four.
Liebig's Extract of Meat was the product of the German chemist Justus von Liebig's mid-nineteenth-century work on concentrating beef, manufactured on a large scale from South American cattle and sold worldwide, the genuine article identified by Liebig's facsimile signature in blue. By the time Lowney's Cook Book appeared in 1907, it was a standard American pantry item, and this recipe shows exactly what it was for: producing in minutes a clear, well-flavoured brown stock that would otherwise have meant a day of simmering bones. Aspic itself was central to the entrée course of the period — ccold moulded meats, glazed chicken, decorated eggs — cand a cook who could not spare the time for a proper calf's-foot or veal-bone jelly could now build one from a jar and a packet of granulated gelatine, which Knox and its competitors had been selling since the 1890s.