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Jellied Chicken and Egg Salad
4 eggs, hard cooked 1 onion, chopped 1 red pepper, chopped 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce 1 1/2 cups chicken stock or water 2 tablespoons gelatine 1/4 cup cold water 2 cups diced chicken, cooked Cook eggs until hard and cool. Cook onion, pepper, salt and Worcestershire in stock, and add this hot to gelatine which has been softened in cold water. When thoroughly dissolved pour into an oblong wetted mold to the depth of 1/2 inch, and set on ice until stiffened. Arrange slices of egg on the jelly. Add remainder of sliced eggs and diced chicken to the gelatine stock and pour all into the mold. Chill and serve in slices with salad dressing, either with or without lettuce.
A firm sliceable aspic of the kind that filled 1930s refrigerator cookbooks. The proportions work as written; the only real decisions are the strength of the stock and how patiently you layer.
- The gelatine ratioTwo tablespoons is two standard envelopes (about 1/2 oz) set against 1 3/4 cups total liquid. That is deliberately stiff so the loaf slices cleanly rather than spooning out; it is roughly twice the strength of a soft dessert jelly.
- Bloom, then dissolveSprinkle the gelatine over the 1/4 cup cold water and leave it five minutes before the hot stock goes in. Add the stock hot but not boiling, and stir until no grains remain on a spoon back — undissolved granules are the usual cause of a grainy, weeping loaf.
- Red pepperA sweet red bell pepper, not a chilli. Canned pimiento is a workable substitute; drain and chop it. Note that the recipe as written cooks the pepper in the stock.
- Cooking the aromaticsSimmer the onion, pepper, salt and Worcestershire in the stock five to eight minutes. Raw onion in an aspic stays sharp and slightly crunchy under refrigeration.
- Set on iceI.e. chill it, whether in an icebox or a refrigerator. Give the first 1/2-inch layer 30 to 45 minutes to firm before laying the egg slices on it, or they will sink and spoil the pattern.
- Season above the markChilling flattens salt and acid. Taste the stock warm and take it a shade further than seems right, or add a squeeze of lemon before it sets.
- UnmoldingWetting the mold rather than oiling it is correct here. Dip the mold to the rim in warm — not hot — water for eight to ten seconds, then invert onto a cold platter.
- Yield and dressingAn oblong mold of about 1 quart, giving six to eight slices as a lunch or supper salad. The "salad dressing" of the period was mayonnaise or a cooked boiled dressing; either suits it.
- KeepingCover the loaf once set and eat it within two days. Cooked chicken and egg in a moist jelly are a good medium for bacteria, so keep it refrigerated up to the moment it is sliced.
Jellied loaves like this belong to the era of cooking written for the mechanical refrigerator, which spread through households in the 1920s and 1930s. Granulated gelatine sold in pre-measured envelopes made a dish like this a matter of a tablespoon and a wait, where an earlier cook might have worked from calves' feet or from sheet gelatine that had to be clarified. Manufacturers and utility companies published slim recipe booklets of this sort to demonstrate what the new appliance could do, and a chilled molded salad -- made the night before, sliced cold, served without further cooking -- suited that purpose well. The technique itself is much older: layering the mold, setting a base of clear jelly and arranging sliced egg on it as a pattern, descends from nineteenth-century chaud-froid and molded work, here reduced to something a cook could manage alone on a weekday.