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Various Compound Salads (Then divide into squares like)
then divide into squares like a checker-board, using fine-shredded pimento or pickled beet to mark the divisions; fill in alternate squares with sifted yolk of hard-boiled egg and the remaining squares with chopped white of egg. Garnish the edge with parsley, and set in the centre half an hard-boiled egg cut lengthwise in points and filled with capers.
Pâté de Foie Gras, Moulded in Aspic.
Cover the bottoms of small-sized timbale moulds with a little aspic jelly; decorate the jelly with bits of royal custard and capers; cover with more aspic; then add, alternately, layers of pâté de foie gras and aspic, until the mould is filled. Turn on to shredded lettuce and garnish with mayonnaise, using pastry bag and tube. Arrange on individual dishes, so as not to disarrange the dressing in serving. Or, garnish with a chopped cucumber dressed with French dressing.
Two fragments of garnish-work from the era when a cold salad was judged on its geometry. Neither gives quantities, so treat both as assembly instructions rather than formulas.
- Aspic, and why it must be coldAspic here is clarified meat or poultry stock set with gelatin — figure about 1 tablespoon powdered gelatin per 2 cups of well-flavored stock, more if the stock is not naturally gelatinous. Each layer must be nearly set before the next goes in, or the pâté floats and the decoration drifts. Chill the mould between additions.
- Timbale mouldsSmall metal cups, roughly 3 to 4 ounces each. Dariole moulds, ramekins or even muffin tins stand in. The recipe as written gives no quantities; fill whatever you have.
- Royal custardA period garnish that has largely vanished: egg yolks beaten with a little stock or cream, baked in a shallow pan until firm, chilled, and cut into small shapes for decoration. It contributes color and pattern, nothing else. Cooked egg white, blanched leek, or truffle slices do the same job.
- UnmouldingDip the mould to its rim in hot water for three or four seconds, no longer, then invert. Longer and the decorative bottom layer — which becomes the top — melts into a smear.
- Pâté de foie grasThe book means tinned goose-liver pâté, an imported grocery item of the period. Modern equivalents range from a firm bloc de foie gras to a soft mousse; the soft ones layer more evenly. Foie gras production is restricted or banned in some jurisdictions, and a good chicken-liver parfait behaves identically in the mould.
- The checkerboardSieved yolk and chopped white will only hold a crisp edge on a firm, cold, level surface. Mark the grid first with the pimento or beet shreds, then spoon the egg in with a small spoon and level it with the back of a knife. Do the whole thing on the serving dish; a marked checkerboard cannot be moved.
- ServingThe instruction to plate individually is the operative one — piped mayonnaise on a shared platter collapses the moment a serving spoon touches it. The moulds are sized for one per person; the checkerboard dish is portioned from a single garnished surface.
This page comes from the salad-and-garnish tradition that American cookery writers absorbed from French professional kitchens in the late nineteenth century and passed on to households with servants and time. Aspic work — clarified jelly, decorated in layers, turned out to show the design through the surface — belonged to the garde manger, the cold-kitchen station, and its whole point was that the labor was visible on the plate. Tinned pâté de foie gras, imported from Strasbourg and the southwest of France, was one of the luxury goods a well-stocked American grocer of the period carried, and it appears in cookbooks of the day precisely because it arrived ready to use: the cook supplied the aspic, the moulding and the piping, and the tin supplied the extravagance. Royal custard, the decorative baked-egg garnish called for here, was standard in that vocabulary and is now almost entirely gone from home cooking, surviving mainly as the garnish cut into consommé.