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Jelly Mayonnaise
(Used for masking cold fish or salads, or as a garnish with forcing-bag and tube.) To a cup of mayonnaise dressing beat in gradually from two tablespoonfuls to one-third a cup of chilled but liquid aspic. More seasoning may be needed. Apply to a cold surface, or chill before using with forcing-bag.
This is a coating sauce rather than a dressing to spoon over greens: mayonnaise stiffened with just enough gelatin to set on a cold surface. The whole thing turns on temperature.
- The hinge: aspic that is cool but still fluidWarm aspic will thin the mayonnaise and can break the emulsion; aspic that has begun to set will seize into lumps you cannot beat out. Bring it to the point where it is syrupy and barely flowing, and add it in a thin stream while beating.
- What aspic means hereA clear, well-reduced meat, poultry or fish stock set with gelatin and re-melted to a liquid. If you are not making stock aspic, roughly a teaspoon of powdered gelatin bloomed and dissolved in a third of a cup of strong stock will serve as a rough equivalent.
- Proportions and what they doTwo tablespoons of aspic per cup of mayonnaise gives a sauce thick enough to mask with a spatula; a third of a cup gives one firm enough to hold piped shapes. Start low, since more can always be beaten in and a set mixture is difficult to loosen again without breaking it.
- Forcing-bag and tubeA piping bag and tip. The mixture must be chilled to the consistency of soft buttercream before it will hold a shape, and it stiffens further as it stands, so work in small batches.
- SeasoningGelatin and cold both flatten flavor, and the caution about more seasoning is real. Taste after the aspic goes in and correct with salt, lemon juice or a little mustard — it should taste slightly too sharp at room temperature to be right when cold.
- Masking a cold surfaceThe fish, chicken or mold must be thoroughly chilled and dry, or the coating slides. Ladle it over in one pass rather than brushing, chill until set, then apply a second thin coat if the first shows gaps.
- Raw eggHomemade mayonnaise here is never cooked and the finished sauce sits at buffet temperature. Use pasteurized eggs if serving the very young, the elderly or anyone pregnant, keep the coated dish refrigerated until service, and treat it as a one-day preparation.
This is what French kitchens call mayonnaise collée — literally "glued mayonnaise" — the pale cousin of chaud-froid, the gelatin-set sauce used to give cold buffet dishes their smooth ivory or amber coating. The technique belongs to the era of the elaborate cold table, when a poached salmon or a galantine was expected to arrive masked in an unbroken glaze and decorated with cut truffle, pimiento and hard-boiled egg white, and it is generally traced to the grand nineteenth-century French service that Carême codified and Escoffier's generation carried into hotel practice. Its appearance in an American cookbook shows how thoroughly that professional vocabulary had reached the ambitious home cook by the early twentieth century: an ordinary cup of mayonnaise, a little aspic from the stockpot, and a pastry bag were enough to imitate the restaurant look at home. Refrigeration was the limiting factor — the recipe returns three times to cold or chilling, because the whole effect collapses in a warm room.