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Oysters in Aspic Jelly
Parboil, drain, cool, and wipe dry one quart of oysters. Make a pint of mayonnaise sauce with aspic jelly and coat the well-dried oysters with 65/ the sauce. Prepare a quart of chicken aspic.
Dip in half-set aspic the white of egg, poached and cut in fanciful shapes, and small gherkins cut in thin slices, and decorate the bottom and sides of a charlotte or cylindrical mould standing in ice water. Pour in jelly to the depth of half an inch; when set, arrange the oysters on it in a circle, one overlapping another; pour in more jelly, and, when set, dispose upon it another circle of oysters. Continue this order until the mould is filled. When removed from the mould, garnish with chopped aspic and fans cut from gherkins and lettuce. Serve with the remainder of the pint of mayonnaise.
A moulded aspic in the grand style, built in layers so that each slice shows a ring of oysters suspended in clear jelly. Nothing here is difficult, but the whole thing depends on temperature control and on jelly that sets firm enough to stand up on a plate.
- The stray "65/"That is a printer's artifact — almost certainly a page cross-reference to the mayonnaise recipe that dropped into the text line. Read the sentence as "coat the well-dried oysters with the sauce."
- Parboil means seconds, not minutesParboil briefly -- Bring the oysters up in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle, well under a minute. Anything longer and they shrink and turn to rubber, and they will be sitting in cold jelly for hours afterwards where toughness shows badly.
- Dry them properlyThis is the hinge. Wet oysters bleed liquor into the jelly and it clouds; they also refuse to hold the mayonnaise coating. Spread them on a towel, blot the tops, and chill them before saucing.
- Mayonnaise sauce with aspic jellyNot mayonnaise served alongside aspic — mayonnaise with melted, cooled liquid aspic whisked into it, so it sets to a coating consistency on the oysters. Add the aspic barely warm; hot jelly will split the emulsion.
- Raw yolksThe mayonnaise is never cooked and the finished dish is eaten cold. Use pasteurized eggs, and treat the whole mould as a perishable — assemble over ice, refrigerate between layers, and do not let it stand out on a buffet for more than an hour or two.
- Chicken aspic and modern gelatinA quart of well-reduced chicken stock clarified with egg white may not gel firmly enough to unmould on its own unless it is rich in feet and wings. If in doubt, reinforce with about 1/2 oz (two envelopes) of powdered gelatin per quart, testing a spoonful on a cold plate before committing the whole batch.
- Half-set jelly"Half-set" is the consistency of raw egg white — syrupy but still flowing. Dip the egg-white shapes and gherkin slices at that stage so they stick to the mould without sliding, and set each decorated layer firm before the next goes in.
- A charlotte mouldA plain straight-sided tin, about 1½ to 2 quarts. Any cylindrical mould or a loaf tin works; avoid anything with fine detail, which the oysters will not fill neatly.
- Unmoulding and yieldDip the mould in warm water for five to eight seconds, no more, and invert onto a chilled platter. A quart of oysters in this form serves eight to ten as a first course.
Elaborate moulded aspics of this kind were a fixture of late-Victorian and Edwardian entertaining, when a cold dish that arrived at table gleaming and self-supporting was proof of a competent kitchen — and of a household with ice. The technique descends from French cuisine froide, where chaud-froid and aspic work was the showpiece of the garde-manger, and it reached American cookbooks through Ranhofer, Delmonico's, and the cooking-school movement. Oysters belong here because they were cheap and abundant on both American coasts through the nineteenth century, common enough to be used by the quart in dishes that look luxurious today.