Aspic Jelly
To make savory jelly, take 12 pounds of meat and feet. 12 quarts of water. 12 hours to boil them gently. 12 cloves. 1 bay leaf. 1 small turnip. 1 small onion. 1 carrot. 1 rounded tablespoonful of pepper. 1 do do salt. 3 to 6 lemons, juice only. 6 eggs to clarify the jelly.
As has been already intimated it makes but little difference in ordinary life what kind of meat is used. For choice we will say 2 calves' feet, 2 pigs' feet with the shanks attached, 2 old fowls and some veal bones or shin of beef. Chop and break the pieces. Put them on in a boiler having a false bottom to prevent burning, or, otherwise, put a pie plate in before the meat. Fill with cold water. Bring to a boil and skim off what rises to the top. Then push the boiler to the back part of the range, and let simmer gently about 12 hours. It should by that time be reduced to about a third of the quantity of water first put in and will set in jelly when cold. But during the time of cooking the vegetables and salt and pepper should have been added. White pepper is best, whole black pepper, broken a little, is next, and if you have not these ground black pepper will do.
Strain off you 4 quarts of jelly and fat, from the meat and bones, and set it away to get quite cold. Then take off the grease from the top, and wipe off the last particles with a cloth dipped in warm water. Now melt the jelly in a good sized kettle or bright tin pan. Squeeze in some lemon juice-enough to give it a tart taste. Of the six eggs take 2 entire, 4 whites, and all the shells, and a cup of cold water, beat them up, add them to the melted jelly and beat up to mix. Then boil-about half an hour will be right. One reason of trouble in making jelly is the white of egg does not get cooked enough, but runs like milk through the jelly bag and makes the jelly cloudy when it should be clear. If it boils over too much set the kettle and all in the even till the white of egg has become a gray curd; then it will strain clear.
Another trouble is when you try to do without lemons the jelly very often is gummy and will not run through flannel, nor hardly through a seive. An acid cuts it and makes it limped. If you must use vinegar instead of lemon juice, you must. It will have the same effect-to make the jelly run through. The jelly bag is made of red flannel-about a yard-a wire ring to hold the top open-the bag running down to a point, funnel shaped. Suspend it by strings like the bail of a bucket.
The clarifying process above may of course be applied to any soup stock or gelatine liquor, and applies with more force to sweetened jellies, which are harder to make than aspic.
The aspic may be cooled on dishes, of right depth to stamp out fancy shapes when cold. The color will likely be light straw color. A few drops of burnt sugar caramel will make it amber and a few more brandy or ale color. A few drops of red coloring will make pink of the clear and port wine color of the brown.
The other way will come more familiarly home to hotel cooks where the stock boiler is the always ready resource.
Aspic Jelly.-Hotel Method.
Draw off 4 quarts of clear soup stock from the stock boiler. It has already been lightly seasoned with the common vegetables, and for this use should have a head of celery and a handful of parsley extra. Chop about 2 pounds of lean beef fine like sausage. Mix a pint of cold water with it, then put the beef in the 4 quarts of stock and boil it a short time. Strain this consomme from the beef through a fine gravy strainer, and set it in the refrigerator that the grease may be all taken off when cold.
Then add to it the whites and shells of 6 eggs, juice of 4 lemons, 1 bay leaf, a tablespoonful of bruised pepper corns, or some white pepper, the same of salt, a ladleful of cold water beaten in the eggs, and 4 ounces of the cheap, white gelatine, that floats while dissolving and can't burn. Bring the mixture to a boil, with frequent stirring When done pour it 3 or 4 times through the jelly bag.
Now we have a pail of savory jelly in the ice chest always ready, and can go along with the salad-making.
Two methods for the same thing: a long-simmered stock jelly set entirely by its own collagen, and a hotel shortcut that props up ready stock with leaf gelatine. Both hinge on the clarification, not the boiling.
- The hinge: cook the egg raft properlyThe recipe is blunt about the usual failure — the whites never set into a curd and instead bleed through the bag as cloudy threads. Bring the egged jelly up slowly with stirring until it moves, then stop stirring and let it hold at a bare tremble until the raft is a firm grey mass. Half an hour of gentle heat is not excessive here; a hard rolling boil will shred the raft and undo the work.
- Why the lemon juice mattersThe acid is not only for flavour. A heavy meat stock reduced by two thirds can be gluey enough to refuse to drain, and acidification thins it and helps the proteins coagulate. Three to six lemons in four quarts is a wide range — start at three, taste for a clean tartness, and add more if the jelly still runs sluggishly.
- Scale and yieldTwelve pounds of bones and feet in twelve quarts of water yields about four quarts of finished jelly — restaurant volume. Quartering the whole thing works cleanly: 3 lb of feet and bones, 3 quarts water, one calf's foot, a quarter of the aromatics.
- "Old fowls" and calves' feetAn old fowl is a spent laying hen, still sold as a stewing hen or soup fowl and worth seeking out for its collagen and flavour. Calves' and pigs' feet are the main gelling agents and are ordered from a butcher; the veal bones or shin of beef the recipe also lists carry collagen too, but without the feet the set will be much weaker. A supermarket broiler contributes almost nothing in the way of body.
- The false bottomTwelve hours over direct heat scorches. A perforated insert, a steamer rack, or the recipe's own suggestion of a pie plate laid in the bottom keeps the bones off the metal. A very low oven overnight is the modern equivalent and needs no watching.
- Straining gearA yard of red flannel hung on a wire ring is simply a conical bag with a slow, fine drip. Damp double muslin or a jelly bag in a stand does the same job. Wet the cloth first and never squeeze it; pressure forces fines through and clouds what you just cleared. Passing the run-through back through the bag three or four times, as the hotel method directs, polishes it.
- "Set the kettle in the even"A typo for oven. The point is that surrounding heat cooks the raft without the fierce bottom heat that makes it boil over. The recipe gives no temperature.
- The hotel gelatine ratioFour ounces of gelatine to four quarts of stock is roughly 1 oz per quart, a firm slicing set meant to be stamped into shapes and to survive a warm dining room. The recipe specifies only a cheap white gelatine that floats while dissolving, not a leaf or sheet form; modern powdered gelatine is more consistent in strength, so for a jelly that is merely spoonable rather than carvable, use rather less.
- ColouringBurnt sugar caramel is plain sugar cooked to dark and dissolved in water — still used for tinting stocks amber. Add it drop by drop into the warm jelly before straining.
- KeepingAspic is stock, and it spoils like stock. The "pail in the ice chest always ready" assumed daily turnover; refrigerate below 40F, use within three or four days, and reboil if it is to be melted and reused.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the Chicago hotel-cookery writing of Jessup Whitehead, whose books were aimed squarely at men working commercial ranges rather than at housewives, which is why this entry says of the stock-boiler method that it "will come more familiarly home to hotel cooks." Aspic — the usual explanation of the name being a comparison to the mottled skin of the asp, though that etymology is traditional rather than settled — was near-compulsory in the late-nineteenth-century garde-manger repertoire: chaud-froid coatings, moulded galantines, chopped croutons of jelly banked around a cold salmon, the stamped "fancy shapes" mentioned here. Before commercial gelatine was cheap and reliable, all of it depended on somebody boiling feet for half a day, and the passage gives patient attention to why jelly turns cloudy or gummy.