Home › Salad Dressings › Aspic for Garnishing
Aspic for Garnishing
Pour the liquid jelly into a new tin to the depth of half an inch. Wring a napkin out of cold water and spread it smoothly over the meat-board. Dip the pan in warm water and turn the jelly onto the napkin; stamp in rounds, diamonds or other fanciful shapes. If blocks of greater thickness be required, fill the pan to the required depth with the liquid aspic. When turned from the mould, cut in squares or diamonds with a knife, wiped dry after having been dipped in hot water.
This is a finishing technique rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have a well-clarified aspic jelly at hand and tells you how to turn it into cut garnishes. Everything depends on the set being firm enough to hold an edge.
- Set it firmer than a moulded jellyAspic meant for cutting has to stand up to a knife or cutter without slumping. Figure on a stiff jelly — roughly a tablespoon of powdered gelatin per cup of stock rather than the softer set used for a moulded ring — and chill it thoroughly, at least four hours and preferably overnight.
- "A new tin"Any shallow straight-sided pan will do; a quarter-sheet pan or a small square cake tin gives the half-inch depth called for. The call for a new one probably has to do with avoiding scratched, discolored tinware that would mar the surface and stick.
- The damp napkinThis is the hinge of the method. A cloth wrung out in cold water keeps the jelly from bonding to the board and lets you lift cut shapes cleanly; a dry board or a paper towel will tear them. A sheet of parchment lightly wiped with cold water works the same way.
- Dipping the panWarm, not hot, and only for a few seconds — long enough to release the sheet, not to melt the surface. If the edges go glossy and slack you have overdone it; return the pan to the refrigerator to firm up.
- "Stamp in rounds"Small aspic cutters were sold for this; plain round or fluted pastry cutters, or the wide end of a piping tip, do the job. Press straight down without twisting, and wipe the cutter between shapes.
- The hot knifeFor thicker blocks, dip the blade in hot water and dry it before each cut. A wet blade drags the gelatin and leaves a ragged face; a dry warm blade slices glass-clean.
- Keep it cold, and keep it shortAspic is stock and gelatin, an excellent medium for bacterial growth, and these garnishes sit at room temperature on a platter. Cut them the day you serve, hold them refrigerated until the last moment, and discard leftovers rather than saving them.
- YieldA half-inch layer in an 8-inch square pan gives enough cut shapes to garnish two or three large platters; scraps can be chopped fine and scattered as a glittering bed under cold meat or fish.
Aspic garnishing belonged to the garde-manger, the cold-kitchen station of the professional nineteenth-century hotel, and it filtered into American home cookery through the cooking schools. The point was visual: a cold salmon or a galantine was expected to arrive under a lacquer of clear jelly, ringed with cut diamonds and crescents that caught the light. The name is generally traced to the French aspic, with the resemblance of the mottled jelly to a snake's markings offered as the traditional explanation, though the etymology is not settled. By the close of the century packaged granulated gelatin was increasingly available alongside the older method of long-boiling calves' feet, which could shorten such work considerably, though many books went on calling for jelly set from feet and knuckles.