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Jellied Chicken
3 ounces vegetable gelatine 2 cups of chicken broth 1 cup chopped chicken Salt, onion juice Soak the gelatine in a cup of hot water 20 minutes, and add the boiling hot broth, stirring until dissolved. Season well. Pour in a mold wet with cold water, enough gelatine to cover the bottom, and put aside until firm. Mix the chopped chicken with the rest of the gelatine and put in the mold. Serve with a highly seasoned sauce. A decoration of truffles may be put on top of the mold.
A cold moulded loaf set with agar rather than animal gelatine, which is the whole point of its inclusion in a meatless book. Two things need attention before you start: the setting agent behaves nothing like gelatine, and the quantity given is far too much.
- Vegetable gelatine is agar-agarSold then as shredded strands, sticks or "Japanese isinglass", now most often as a fine powder or flakes. It is a seaweed extract and sets firm at room temperature, so it will not slump on a warm table the way a gelatine mould does.
- The quantity is out of rangeThree ounces of agar to three cups of liquid is on the order of a 12 percent gel — a hard, sliceable brick closer to rubber than to a jelly. Agar sets at about 1 percent; for 2 cups of broth plus 1 cup of water, 2 to 3 teaspoons of powder, or about 3 tablespoons of flakes, gives a firm mould that still cuts cleanly. If the original meant loosely packed strands measured by bulk the number is less absurd, but there is no way to recover the intended weight, so work from the percentage.
- Agar must actually boilThis is the hinge. Soaking softens it, but the strands or flakes only dissolve at a rolling boil held one to two minutes. Broth that is merely "boiling hot" when poured over will cool below the dissolving point and you will get gritty specks suspended in a weak set. Bring soaked agar and broth to the boil together in a saucepan instead.
- It sets fastAgar gels at around 100-105F, well above room temperature, so the mixture starts to firm while you are still working. Have the mould rinsed and the chicken chopped before the pan goes on, and pour the base layer immediately; the second layer will bond fine if the first is only just set.
- Onion juiceGrate a piece of onion and press the pulp through a sieve, or grate it on a microplane. A teaspoon is enough for three cups; it is a seasoning here, not a vegetable.
- Season above your instinct"Season well" is meant literally. Cold set dishes read flat, and both salt and acid dull once chilled — taste the hot liquid and push it slightly past what seems right.
- The sauce and the trufflesA highly seasoned sauce here was likely something sharp and cold: mustard mayonnaise, a tarragon vinaigrette or a horseradish cream. Truffle rounds can be laid in the thin base layer, which becomes the top once the mould is turned out.
- YieldAbout four cups moulded, serving four as a lunch dish with salad, or six sliced thin as part of a cold table.
Agar-agar reached Western vegetarian kitchens through Japan, where it has long been made as kanten by freezing and drying gelled seaweed, and it mattered to vegetarian and reform cooks because ordinary gelatine came from animal bones, skins and connective tissue. It was the usual substitute for a cook who wanted a jellied mould without it — carrageen (Irish moss) served the same end — so "vegetable gelatine" turns up throughout the meatless literature of the early twentieth century, often with no explanation of what it is. The presence of real broth and real chopped chicken here is a reminder that some books of this period used "meatless" loosely, sometimes meaning free of red butcher's meat rather than free of all flesh, and that their chicken and fish chapters sat alongside the nut roasts.