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Fish Salads (Two-pound lobsters into small)
two-pound lobsters into small cubes. Season with French dressing. Fill the open space in the aspic with the salad; garnish the top with the feelers and delicate lettuce leaves, and arrange a wreath of lettuce leaves around the aspic. Stamp out rounds of bread; stamp again with the same cutter to form crescents, spread delicately with butter, and then with caviare seasoned with a few drops of lemon juice, and dispose symmetrically on the lettuce.
Mousseline of Lobster as a Salad.
Chill timbale moulds in ice water; dip thin slices of gherkins into half-set aspic, and arrange them symmetrically against the sides of the moulds, and brush over the decoration with aspic. Cut the claw meat of a two-pound lobster into small cubes; chop fine, and pound the remaining meat in a mortar; then add to it the liver and fat, and pass through a sieve. There should be about one cup.
Simmer the shell in water to cover half an hour.
Beat the yolks of three eggs, slightly, with onefourth a teaspoonful of salt and a dash of paprica; add one cup of the lobster liquor very gradually, and cook over hot water as a boiled custard. Remove from the fire and add one-fourth a package of gelatine, softened in one-fourth a cup of cold lobster liquor, or chicken stock; strain over the sifted lobster meat and stir occasionally over ice water; when it begins to set, add the lobster dice, and fold in carefully one cup of whipped cream.
A Turn the mixture into the decorated mould, and, when set, turn out on to lettuce leaves. Decorate with the head, feelers and claws of the lobster. Serve with French or mayonnaise dressing. French dressing is preferable with so rich a mixture.
This page runs two lobster dishes together, and the first one begins mid-sentence — the missing lines called for lobster meat cut up and set into a ring or border of aspic. The mousseline is the substantial recipe here, and it is a cooked custard set with gelatine and lightened with cream.
- Aspic is assumed, not givenBoth dishes rest on a clear savoury jelly the author expects you to have on hand — traditionally fish or chicken stock clarified with egg white and set with gelatine. A good fish or chicken stock plus gelatine at the ratio on the packet will do; it needs to be genuinely clear or the gherkin decoration will not read through it.
- Timbale mouldsSmall straight-sided moulds of roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup. The full mixture comes to about three cups, so expect six small moulds or one 1-quart mould; count on six servings as a first course.
- The gelatine measure is unreliable"One-fourth a package" meant something specific in 1900 and nothing specific now. Modern envelopes hold 1/4 oz (about 2 1/4 teaspoons) and are generally reckoned to set two cups of liquid; with roughly three cups of custard, pur egion of one to one and a half envelopes, softened in cold liquid as directed, is a reasonable modern equivalent. Half-set aspic for the decoration wants to be at the syrupy stage, not fluid.
- Cook the custard to temperature, not to timeEgg yolks with a cup of hot lobster liquor over simmering water thicken at about 175-180F. Much above that the yolks curdle and no amount of sieving will save the texture. Add the liquor gradually, as written, and pull it the moment it coats the spoon.
- Lobster liquorSimmering the shells thirty minutes in water to cover gives a light, sweet broth that carries most of the flavour in this dish. Strain it well; grit and shell fragments are the usual fault.
- Fold the cream last and coldThe hinge of the recipe: the gelatine base must be stirred over ice water until it just begins to thicken before the whipped cream goes in. Fold too early and the cream sinks into a layer; too late and the base sets in lumps you cannot smooth out.
- PapricaPaprika. In this period it meant mild sweet Hungarian pepper used as much for colour as heat.
- UnmouldingDip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto the lettuce. Chill at least four hours, and preferably overnight, before turning out.
- The garnishReserving the head, feelers and claws to reassemble on the plate was standard display cookery. It is optional and adds nothing to the eating; the caviare crescents on buttered bread, on the other hand, are a genuinely good accompaniment.
Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties (1899) belongs to the moment when American middle-class cooking absorbed the vocabulary of the French professional kitchen aic, French dressing ait to work on a chafing dish in the dining room rather than a range in the basement. A mousseline is properly a pur cream; the addition of gelatine to hold it in a decorated mould is the cold-buffet version, the sort of thing that filled the illustrated pages of Escoffier's contemporaries and trickled down to New England hostesses through cooking schools. Hill ran the Boston Cooking School Magazine, and the fussy symmetry here asted with aspic, bread stamped twice to make crescents, the lobster's feelers rebuilt on the platter aookery display work aimed at the household with one servant and social ambitions.