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Fish Salads (Place one hour or more Have)
place one hour or more. Have ready six hardboiled eggs; cut a thin slice from the round end of each egg, that it may stand upright, then cut in quarters lengthwise. Dip into a little aspic jelly or melted gelatine and arrange the quarters in the form of a circle, with the yolks outside.
This is the tail end of a longer entry — the page picks up mid-sentence, and what survives is the garnish: a ring of hardboiled egg quarters glazed with aspic and set around a moulded fish salad. It works as written if you treat it as a finishing step rather than a whole dish.
- The missing first half"place one hour or more" is the tail of an instruction to let something stand, most likely "in a cool place"; with the preceding text missing we cannot know whether the hour was for chilling the moulded salad or for letting the dressed fish stand. If you are chilling, use the refrigerator and count from when the mixture is fully cold.
- Aspic jellyA clear savoury jelly made by clarifying a well-reduced fish or veal stock, or by setting a light stock with gelatine. For six eggs you need very little — a quarter cup of liquid aspic is ample. About 1 teaspoon of powdered gelatine per half cup of stock gives a firm glaze that clings to the egg rather than a soft table jelly.
- Working temperature for the glazeThe hinge of the whole operation. Aspic must be liquid but barely warm — cool enough that it thickens to a syrup on the back of a spoon, which in practice is somewhere around room temperature. Too hot and it runs straight off the egg; too cool and it sets in lumps. Set the bowl over ice water and stir until it just begins to thicken, then dip.
- Dip and setDip each quarter, lift it out on a fork, and put it straight onto a chilled plate or tray. Two thin coats look far better than one thick one; let the first set for five minutes in the refrigerator before the second.
- Cutting the eggsCook the eggs so the yolks are just set and still bright — about 10 minutes in barely simmering water, then straight into cold water. Overcooked yolks develop the grey-green ring and crumble when quartered. Use a thin blade wiped between cuts.
- "Yolks outside"The quarters are set in a ring with the pale yolk face turned outward, so the circle reads as a band of yellow; the recipe's slice off the round end is what lets them stand rather than slump. It only works if the eggs are cut cleanly and the yolks are centred.
- YieldSix eggs make twenty-four quarters, enough to ring a salad of moderate size; the original gives no serving number. Assemble no more than an hour or two before serving; aspic weeps and dulls if it stands too long.
Aspic-glazed garnishes of this kind belong to the chaud-froid tradition of the professional kitchen, filtered down into household cookery through the vogue for cold luncheon dishes. The point was visual: a cold fish salad is a shapeless thing, and a ring of glossy egg quarters gave it an edge, a colour scheme and an air of having been composed rather than spooned out. Gelatine had become cheap and reliable in packaged sheet and powdered form, which is why books of this kind are full of moulded and glazed cold dishes that would previously have demanded a long day of boiling calves' feet. Fish salad itself was a thrift dish as much as a fashionable one — cold cooked fish, flaked and bound with mayonnaise — and the aspic finish is what carried it from the kitchen to the luncheon table.