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Fish Salads (Pieces of pickled beet)
pieces of pickled beet in the dissolved gelatine and place upon the front and top of each half of egg. Spread the edge of the fish, after removing the skin, with jelly mayonnaise, or green butter, and, when set, decorate with figures cut from the cooked white of an egg. With forcing-bag and tube shape a pattern around the upper edge of the fish. Place the fish in the centre of the crown or miroton of eggs, with the peas seasoned with French dressing around it; cover the place from which the bone was taken with the centre of a head of lettuce, cut in halves, and two fine olives. Serve with a bowl of mayonnaise.
This page is the tail end of a longer set of directions — the fish has already been poached, boned and chilled, and the eggs hard-cooked and halved before the text picks up. What survives is the garnishing and plating, which is where most of the labour in a Gilded Age cold fish salad actually went.
- Read it as a finishing methodThe opening lines of the recipe are missing, so quantities and the fish itself are unstated. Treat this as a decorating scheme to apply to any large cold poached fish laid on a platter with the backbone removed; the recipe does not say how or from which side it was taken out.
- Jelly mayonnaiseMayonnaise with dissolved gelatine stirred in so it sets to a coating consistency. Figure about 1 teaspoon powdered gelatine, bloomed and melted, per cup of mayonnaise; it must be barely warm when it goes on or it will thin the sauce and slide off.
- Green butterSoftened butter pounded with blanched spinach, parsley or tarragon and sieved, used cold as a spreadable coating. Modern equivalent: a food processor, then push it through a fine sieve to get the smooth surface the decoration needs.
- MirotonA ring or crown of overlapping slices arranged around a central dish — here the halved eggs set upright around the fish.
- Forcing-bag and tubeA piping bag and a small star or rose tip. Pipe with jelly mayonnaise or green butter that has been chilled until it holds a ridge; if it sags, the platter and the coating both need another twenty minutes in the refrigerator.
- Pickled beet as decorationCut the beet into small rounds or diamonds, blot it dry, and dip it in barely-liquid plain gelatine so it glues to the egg and takes a gloss. Wet beet is liable to bleed pink across the egg white.
- Keep it coldGelatine-set mayonnaise on cold fish is a room-temperature buffet dish by design. Assemble on a chilled platter, refrigerate until service, and do not leave it standing more than two hours. If anyone at the table is pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, make the mayonnaise with pasteurized eggs.
Elaborate cold fish in aspic and jelly mayonnaise belongs to the long shadow of Carême and Urbain Dubois, whose cuisine froide made the decorated buffet piece a showpiece of the nineteenth-century sideboard. By the time this book appeared the technique had filtered down from professional kitchens to the ambitious middle-class hostess, who could buy gelatine in sheets and packets rather than boiling it down from calves' feet. The forcing-bag, the sieved green butter, the figures cut from cooked egg white and the head of lettuce used to hide where the backbone came out are all borrowed from the garde-manger's repertoire — labour-intensive work that assumed a cook, or at least a free afternoon.