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Salad in Jelly
Make Aspic Jelly: Fill bottom of salad dish with a little of the jelly and set on ice. When hard, set in the salad dish on top of jelly, a bowl large enough to hold the desired amount of salad, and fill bowl with ice; pour jelly around until almost reaching top of the bowl; when jelly is hard, remove ice from bowl and fill with warm water for moment only; then remove bowl from jelly, being careful not to break jelly. Make any ordinary salad, such as chicken, veal, lobster, shrimp or red tomatoes sliced with a little green, celery or lettuce, mixed. Place salad in space left in jelly and cover salad with remaining jelly; set on ice.
This is a method rather than a formula: a bowl-within-a-bowl trick for building a hollow aspic shell that gets filled with salad. The whole thing depends on the jelly being firm enough to stand once unmolded, and on everything staying properly cold.
- Aspic jelly strengthThe book assumes you have a clarified, well-flavored stock jelly on hand from another page. For a mold that must hold its shape out of the dish, work to about 2 1/2 teaspoons of powdered gelatin per cup of cold liquid "strong enough to cut clean" rather than the softer set used for spooning. A rich homemade chicken or veal stock will already carry some of that load.
- "Set on ice" means the refrigeratorIn a period kitchen this was the ice chest or a bowl nested in cracked ice. Use the refrigerator, 40F or below, and allow an hour for each layer to set firm before adding the next.
- Weight the inner bowlAn empty bowl floats the moment you pour jelly around it. Fill it with ice, as directed, or with pie weights, and hold it down until the jelly around it begins to thicken, or it will drift off center and the wall will be thin on one side.
- Center it and check the wallChoose an inner bowl that leaves a wall of at least half an inch all around. Thinner than that and the shell tears when you unmold or slice.
- The warm-water releaseThis is the hinge of the whole thing. Fill the inner bowl with warm, not hot, water for roughly ten to twenty seconds, then lift it straight up with a gentle twist. Any longer and you melt a slick of jelly that will never re-set smoothly.
- Dress the salad lightlyA wet, heavily mayonnaised filling will bleed into the jelly and cloud it. Dress the chicken, veal or shellfish sparingly, drain tomatoes well, and let excess dressing run off before the salad goes into the cavity.
- Cover with cool, not warm, jellyThe remaining aspic must be liquid but barely above room temperature when poured over the filling, or it will melt the shell it is meant to seal. Let it cool to the point where it is syrupy and just short of setting.
- Holding and servingCooked meat or shellfish suspended in stock jelly is a good medium for bacteria once it warms. Keep it refrigerated until the moment it goes to table, serve within a day, and do not leave it out through a long buffet.
- YieldA quart-and-a-half salad dish with a pint bowl set inside gives roughly six to eight servings, depending on how generous the filling is.
Molded aspics were the showpiece of the cold table in American and British cookery from the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth. The word comes through French, and the connection to the asp is traditional lore rather than settled etymology, often explained by the cold of the jelly or by the mottled look of a garnished mold. Before commercial powdered gelatin was cheap and reliable, the jelly came from long-simmered calf's foot or veal knuckle, clarified with egg white. The bowl-within-a-bowl construction produces a clear amber wall with the salad glimpsed inside.