Home › Salad Dressings › Mushroom Salad with Medallions of Chicken
Mushroom Salad with Medallions of Chicken
،، Bone a chicken, fill with forcemeat, and cook until tender in stock; then press between two dishes until cold. Cut in slices and stamp in rounds. Stamp out an equal number of rounds from cooked tongue. Spread these with green butter" (see Green-Butter Sandwiches) and place the rounds of chicken evenly on the tops. Coat these with white chaud-froid sauce and decorate in some design with truffles, ham or tongue.
When the sauce has set, brush over the medallions with aspic jelly, cold but not set. When thoroughly cold stamp out with a round cutter. Drain and dry a can of white button mushrooms; toss them about in cold aspic until they are well coated. When the jelly has become fixed about them, pile high in the centre of a serving-dish; arrange the medallions about them, resting on delicate leaves of lettuce. Serve mayonnaise or 80,
This is a garde-manger set piece rather than a salad in the current sense: cold sliced chicken and tongue, glazed in layers, arranged around mushrooms in jelly. Nearly all the work is in the coatings, and each one has to set fully before the next goes on.
- The hinge: temperature of the coatingsChaud-froid and aspic must be applied at the point where they flow like heavy cream but are on the edge of setting, which is what the recipe means by "cold but not set." Warmer and they run off the medallions; cooler and they set in ridges. Chill the pieces hard between coats and work quickly in a cool room.
- Chaud-froid sauceA velouté or béchamel enriched with cream and set with gelatine (or with a well-reduced gelatinous stock). The book assumes you already have it; a modern cook can use about 1 tablespoon of powdered gelatine per 2 cups of thickened, seasoned sauce.
- Aspic jellyClarified stock set with gelatine. Commercial gelatine sheets or powder are standardised and easy to overdose, where a home-reduced gelatinous stock varied; aim for a jelly that just holds a clean edge when cut, not a rubbery one, or the glaze will be unpleasant to eat.
- "Stamp in rounds"Cut with a plain round cutter, roughly 1½ to 2 inches. The final stamping after glazing trims the set aspic back to a clean edge, so cut the first rounds a little smaller than the finishing cutter.
- Green butterButter creamed with pounded, blanched herbs — parsley, tarragon, chervil, sometimes spinach for colour. A food processor does in seconds what the original expected of a mortar.
- Boning and forcemeatA whole boned chicken filled with forcemeat and poached in stock is a galantine. A butcher will bone a bird on request; the forcemeat is typically ground veal or chicken with cream, egg and seasoning. Poach to an internal 165F, then press under weight overnight in the refrigerator so it slices cleanly.
- Cooked tongueWhole beef or veal tongue was a staple of the cold larder and is now a special order. Sliced deli tongue or, failing that, a firm cooked ham of similar colour will stamp just as well.
- Canned button mushroomsThe recipe genuinely wants them: drained and dried they are firm, uniform and pale, which is what the glaze needs. Fresh buttons will weep and cloud the aspic unless briefly cooked and thoroughly dried first.
- Holding and servingEverything here is set with gelatine and served cold; keep it refrigerated until the moment it goes out and do not let it stand at room temperature for more than about two hours. Figure two or three medallions per person, so a single chicken and one tongue will serve eight to ten as a first course.
- The broken last lineThe text ends mid-sentence: "Serve mayonnaise or 80," is a corruption, and the stray figure may be a cross-reference number rather than part of the sentence. What was intended cannot be recovered; any well-made cold sauce served alongside the mayonnaise suits the dish.
Chaud-froid — literally "hot-cold" — is a sauce cooked hot and served cold, set with gelatine so it clings to poultry, game or fish in a smooth ivory coat that can then be decorated with cut truffle, tongue and ham and sealed under clear aspic. It belongs to the nineteenth-century French garde-manger, the cold kitchen whose showpieces filled the buffet tables of grand hotels and were later codified in the professional repertoire Escoffier set down. Its appearance in a household book shows how far that restaurant vocabulary had travelled: the reader is expected to know what a forcemeat is, to own a set of round cutters, and to keep aspic on hand. The canned button mushrooms in the centre suit the dish because tinned goods gave the cook the uniform pale buttons the finished arrangement depends on.