Home › Recipes › Aspic of Shbimps or Prawns
Aspic of Shbimps or Prawns
Good aspic or savory jelly is a really pleasant condiment with shrimps and the like as well as very pretty ornament, but someone remarks in a commonsense way that it ought to be fish jelly instead of meat jelly. 1. Pick a quart of shrimps and keep the largest and shapliest for this purpose, laying aside the broken pieces for fish sauce, etc. Shake up the shrimps in oil and vinegar enough to make them shine. Chop some bright amber-colored jelly. Slice extremely fine, or chop-only just before it is to be used-some green lettuce, cress and mustard, or celery with half green tops, as may be convenient, and season with oil, vinegar and salt. Put a spoonful of the green salad in each small dish and form a border with it. In the middle place a spoonful of the chopped jelly well spread out, and on that, well in the center, not to hide the border of jelly, place a spoonful of shrimps. Take up a little more of the chopped jelly on a silver fork and striking dredge it all over the dish. 2. Melt some jelly and add to it a flavoring of pepper sauce, Halford sauce (poured off clear without dregs) and one drop of red coloring. Spread the shrimps close together and only two deep on the largest sized meat platter, pour enough of the jelly over just to cement the shrimps together and set the dish in the refrigerator to get cold.
When to be dished up cut the shrimps in jelly in cakes, either with a sharp knife in oblongs, triangles, squares, or diamonds, leaving no residue, or with a round or oval cutter.
Dish up in combination with a green salad border. One oblong cake on a bed of cress. Two small triangles set up against a pile of salad in the middle. 3. The last is one of the speedy if somewhat rough-and-ready ways that are always practicable, while this takes time.
Prepare a small bowl of chopped green lettuce, about a pint may do, and moisten it with some salad dressing.
Pour a spoonful of flavored jelly in each one of about 25 slender conical shaped wine glasses, or moulds like them, let it run all around to coat the sides, stick the shrimps in order upon the jelly, and let it set in a cold place. When about two rows have been put in place, put a teaspoonful of the chopped lettuce in the cavity, and the shrimps dipped in jelly, on the point of a fork, can be placed in the upper rows easily. Fill up with the prepared lettuce and pour a spoonful of jelly on top of that and be sure the moulds stand level while the jelly is setting. The moulds or glasses have to be placed in ice water when the weather is not cold.
To dish up, dip the mould a moment in warm water, wipe the outside and shake the shape of jellied shrimps out onto a bed of cress in its dish. Stick a plume of fennel or a flower in the top of the cone. 4. The stamping works now turn out a great variety of fancy shapes of gem pans, some in form of scallop shells, that are well adapted for moulding these individual aspics in, and are less troublesome than border moulds. There is no good reason why this day's dinner should be just like any other day's dinner in these little ornamental accessories.
This is a garnishing exercise more than a cooking one: four ways to present cooked shrimp set in savory jelly. The whole thing stands or falls on the jelly, which the original assumes you already have in the larder.
- The jelly is the recipe"Good aspic or savory jelly" here means a clarified, well-flavored stock jelly, set in the period with its own gelatin, isinglass or calf's foot and most easily today with powdered gelatin; the remark the author passes along — that it ought to be fish jelly instead of meat jelly — is worth heeding. For jelly firm enough to cut in clean oblongs and to chop without weeping, count on roughly 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons of powdered gelatin per cup of cold stock; use somewhat less for the coating jelly in the moulds so it stays tender.
- "Amber-colored" and "one drop of red"A properly clarified stock jelly is pale gold on its own. The single drop of red coloring in method 2 may have been cochineal or another period food color; modern liquid color works, but a pinch of sweet paprika steeped in the warm jelly and strained gives the same blush with better flavor.
- Halford sauceHalford Leicestershire Table Sauce was a widely advertised bottled table sauce of the period, in the same family as Worcestershire and long gone from shelves. Worcestershire is the straightforward stand-in, and the instruction to pour it off clear without the dregs still applies — sediment will cloud the jelly.
- Pepper sauceMeans a thin bottled cayenne-and-vinegar sauce, not a thick chili paste. Tabasco or any Louisiana-style vinegar pepper sauce is the right register; add it to the melted jelly a few drops at a time and taste cold, since gelatin mutes seasoning.
- Picking a quart of shrimpsVolume, not weight — a quart of peeled cooked small shrimp is roughly a pound to a pound and a quarter. Allow extra when buying them in the shell. "Picked" means shelled, and the broken tail meat set aside for sauce is worth keeping.
- Mustard and cressThe sprouted seedlings of white mustard and garden cress. Any peppery microgreen or watercress gives the same effect. Chop it at the last possible moment as instructed, or it wilts and bleeds into the dressing.
- Chopping the jellySet the jelly in a shallow pan so it is only about half an inch thick, turn it out onto a cold surface, and cut it with a knife dipped in hot water. Chop it just before serving and keep the plates cold; chopped aspic starts to slump within minutes at room temperature.
- Gem pansNineteenth-century gem pans are what we call muffin tins. Silicone moulds or small dariole cups do the job now, and the trick of a brief dip in warm water followed by wiping the outside dry is still the correct way to unmould.
- Yield and holdingMethod 3 as written fills about 25 small glasses — a buffet quantity. Scale down freely. Whatever the form, these are cold shellfish in an unpreserved jelly: keep them refrigerated until the moment they go out and serve the same day.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the men running American hotel and restaurant kitchens in the 1880s and 90s, and this entry reads exactly like that — a working chef showing four ways to get a cold shellfish dish onto a platter depending on how much time the day allows. Aspic work of this kind was the backbone of the Victorian cold table, where the visual case for a dish mattered as much as its flavor, and clarified jelly was the medium for it because gelatin was one of the few things a cook could rely on to hold a shape in a dining room without refrigeration at the table. The distinction the author raises between fish jelly and meat jelly was a live one in period kitchens. Halford's Leicestershire sauce, name-dropped here without explanation, was familiar enough at the time to need none; that it now requires a footnote is a fair measure of how completely the bottled-sauce market has turned over. The closing line — that there is no good reason for one day's dinner to look like the last — is the whole argument of the chapter in a sentence.