Molded Chicken
Boil chicken until tender, season water highly. When cold cut into pieces or strips as nearly one size as possible to look nice. Ornament the bottom of mold with slices of hard boiled eggs, thin slices of pickle, truffles or finely chopped celery. Make a jelly using 1/2 box gelatine to 3 cups liquid. When cold pour a little into mold, add chicken, egg, pickle, etc., move jelly and so on until mold is filled. When congealed turn out on lettuce leaves on platter. Serve with tartar sauce.
A chicken aspic built in layers, of the sort that carried cold meat through a summer buffet. The whole thing hangs on the strength of the jelly and the temperature at which each layer is added.
- "Half a box" of gelatineBoxes of powdered gelatine of this period generally held about an ounce divided into small envelopes, so half a box works out to roughly 1/2 oz, about 14 g. That proportion to 3 cups of liquid should give a jelly firm enough to unmold.
- Use the cooking liquidThe "3 cups liquid" means the highly seasoned water the bird was boiled in. Strain it, chill it, and lift off every trace of fat first; fat left in the stock forms a greasy bloom on the finished surface. Skim any scum before it sets.
- Season past comfortCold jelly tastes markedly blander than warm broth, which is why the original insists the water be seasoned highly. Taste the liquid warm and push the salt and acid further than seems right.
- The hinge: build in stagesPour a thin layer, chill it until it is tacky but not fully set, arrange the garnish and meat, then add more liquid. Adding warm jelly to a set layer melts it and everything floats upward into a jumble.
- Keep the aspic pourableOnce mixed, the jelly must stay just liquid — around body temperature. If it stiffens in the jug, set it briefly over warm water rather than reboiling, which weakens the set.
- Cut the chicken coldLet the bird cool in its broth, then cut. Hot chicken shreds, and the recipe wants pieces of uniform size for the pattern to read through the jelly.
- UnmoldingDip the mold in hot water for a few seconds, or wrap it in a cloth wrung out in hot water, then invert onto the lettuce. A wet platter lets you slide the aspic into place if it lands off center.
- Yield and holdingYield -- three cups of jelly plus the meat from a boiling fowl will roughly fill a 6-cup mold and serve six or so as a cold main course. Keep it cold and eat it within a day or two.
Molded meats in aspic were a fixture of the American cold table from roughly the 1880s through the 1930s, and their spread owes a good deal to packaged powdered gelatine, which turned a day of simmering calves' feet into the work of a few minutes. Mary A. Wilson wrote for a Philadelphia readership in the years around the First World War and was associated with economical cooking: a cold mold like this stretched one boiled fowl across a family meal, used the cooking broth rather than discarding it, and required no oven in hot weather. The truffles in the garnish list are a nod to grander practice -- the same recipe works with the chopped celery or sliced pickle that follows. The recipe pairs tartar sauce with cold poultry rather than fish; how usual that pairing was is not established.