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Other Vegetable Salads (Bread with chaud-froid sauce)
bread with chaud-froid sauce and decorate with fine-chopped parsley or sifted yolk of egg; pour over a little melted aspic. When the aspic is set, trim neatly, and arrange each round of sweetbread on a slice of chilled tomato. Serve inside a border of lettuce around a salad made of the trimmings of the sweetbreads and a cucumber cut in cubes and dressed with mayonnaise.
Cress,-Cucumber-and-Tomato Salad.
Wash the cress and shake dry; arrange as a bed on a serving-dish, discarding the coarse stems; above this make a smaller bed of cucumbers, cut in slices or dice and dressed with French dressing, using three tablespoonfuls of oil and one of vinegar or lemon juice to a pint of cucumber.
Arrange peeled tomatoes, chilled and cut in pieces, upon the cucumbers. Serve with French, cream or mayonnaise dressing.
The page opens mid-sentence, in the middle of a cold sweetbread salad, then moves on to a complete cress, cucumber and tomato salad. The second recipe stands on its own; the first needs the missing steps supplied from general practice.
- What the fragment assumesThe sweetbreads have already been soaked, blanched, trimmed, pressed and thoroughly chilled before the sauce goes on. Nothing in this passage cooks them, so treat them as a fully cooked, cold ingredient going into an assembly job.
- Chaud-froid sauceA white sauce (velouté or béchamel) with dissolved gelatine or reduced aspic stirred in, used at the point where it coats a spoon thickly but has not set. It is a coating sauce for cold food, not a hot one, despite the name.
- AspicClarified savoury jelly, here melted and spooned over the coated rounds as a glaze. Two thin coats set in the refrigerator give a cleaner finish than one thick one, which slides.
- Sifted yolk of eggHard-boiled yolk pushed through a fine sieve, sometimes called mimosa. It is decoration only and should go on while the chaud-froid is still tacky.
- The French dressing ratioThree tablespoons oil to one of vinegar or lemon juice per pint of cucumber. A pint of cut cucumber is about 2 cups, roughly one large cucumber, so the whole dressing is about a quarter cup.
- Dress and layer at the last minuteSalted, dressed cucumber weeps quickly and will flood the cress bed. Cut and dress the cucumbers immediately before building the salad, and keep the tomatoes separately chilled until they go on top.
- CressMost likely garden cress or watercress rather than the microgreens sold in punnets; the direction to discard coarse stems points that way. Discard them as instructed and dry the leaves well, or the dressing will not cling.
- Yield and holdingA pint of cucumber with cress and two or three tomatoes would serve about four as a side salad. Anything gelatine-coated should stay refrigerated until it goes to the table, since aspic softens fast in a warm room.
Chaud-froid and aspic work of this kind is the domestic afterlife of nineteenth-century French restaurant garde-manger cookery, which arrived in American and English household books once reliable commercial gelatine and home ice supplies made cold moulded dishes practical outside professional kitchens. Sweetbreads, now a specialty butcher's item, were then a familiar offal treated as a delicacy. The instruction to build a second salad from "the trimmings of the sweetbreads" is typical of the period's thrift: the showpiece rounds go on the tomato slices, the offcuts go into a second salad set inside a lettuce border, and nothing is thrown away. The cress, cucumber and tomato salad beside it shows the other side of the same book, the plain layered salad that needed only a bowl and a jar of dressing.