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Fillets of Fowl in Aspic
This way of getting the fillets ready, if not quite the best, is easier for everybody to practice than taking them off raw and braising with wine and seasonings.
Cut the breasts from 4 boiled fowls while hot, taking them off with a pointed knife close to the bone, with care not to tear or let the under fillet separate from the large one.
Dip these whole fillets in the stock they were boiled in, dredge with salt and white pepper and then press them between two dishes with a weight on top. When quite cold trim the fillets into pear shape, then with a sharp knife divide them in slices the flat way. Lay the slices in dishes and cover with clear amber jelly. When that is set cut out the fillets and jelly with a tin cutter bent to the shape. Either lay them on little dishes prepared with a bed of chopped jelly of another color, or border them with piping of chopped jelly forced through a funnel or cornet made of writing paper, and lay a slice of lemon on top.
The fact is if the most splendid feasts of ficiton have been left incomplete and spoiled for the want of salads, it is because salads are un-English and the authors are rather unfortunate than to blame. There is a remark in A History of Our Own Times to the effect that England is governed by phrases, and no phrase more powerful than to say a thing is un-English. And it has to be remembered King Richard fought Saladin in Palestine as King James fought tobacco in England, and his countrymen and their descendants have been languidly putting down salad in various ways ever since. Among all the incomplete banquets of English novelists, the man who can make a mayonaise was never so badly needed as at one in the beginning of The Cloister and the Hearth. The feast is, alas, a column long and though quite a curiosity to culinarians is too long to copy. It is Aladdin's cavern garden, with fruit of gold and silver--the Land of Cockaigne with roast pig crying, "eat me!"--the wine flowing valley of Rasselas--a Vitellius banquet--a feast of Penelope's suitors--and a Lallah Roohk's attendance all joined in one Flemish prince's festivity. Fifteen many-colored soups and as many wines. Fish in a dozen forms. Patties of lobster and almonds mixed, and of almonds and cream and an immense variety of "brouets," "known to us as rissoles." A whole hog with hair and eyes too naturally imitated with burnt sugar, an ox stuffed full of all sorts of small animals and roasted whole. Twenty different tarts of fruits and herbs. Confectionery on a gigantic scale. Hippocras and Greek and Corsican wines. But no salads! And would not twenty different kinds of salads, jardiniere, Italienne, a la Russe, and aspics have shone gorgeously amidst all that splendor? It might be contended that Flanders was not a salad-making country, but Webster's dictionary says that the word slaw is nothing but Flemish slaa, and that is only their way of pronouncing French salade; and that kohl is the German for cabbage and we call kohl cold, so that cold slaw is in reality cabbage salade, that is to say is kohl salad or
A cold-buffet piece from the era when a chafing-dish supper was judged on how neatly the jelly cut. The work is all in the pressing and chilling; the cooking is done before you start.
- Press the fillets while hotThis is the hinge. Breast meat taken off a hot bird and weighted between two dishes as it cools sets into a dense slab that slices cleanly the flat way; left to cool loose, it fibres apart under the knife and no amount of jelly will hold the shape. Dip in stock first so the surface does not dry out, and refrigerate under the weight.
- "4 boiled fowls"A fowl here is a mature stewing hen, simmered an hour and a half to two hours until tender. Four birds give eight breasts, enough for a large platter; two supermarket roasting chickens, gently poached, are ample for a household. Keep the poaching liquid — it is the base for the jelly.
- Clear amber jellyA clarified, well-reduced chicken stock set with gelatin, egg-white raft and all. For jelly firm enough to be cut out with a shaped cutter you want roughly one envelope of powdered gelatin (about 2 1/4 teaspoons, 1/4 oz) per cup of stock, and less if the stock is reduced enough to set on its own — considerably stiffer than a jelly meant to be spooned. Test a saucer of it in the refrigerator before you flood the fillets.
- "Jelly of another color"The contrast would usually have been amber chicken aspic against a darker jelly, tinted with caramel or made from a browner stock, or a pale one clouded with cream. Chopped jelly means set jelly cut into rough dice with a wet knife so it glitters.
- The paper cornetA cone rolled from stiff writing paper with the tip cut off — an improvised piping bag. A disposable piping bag with a wide plain tip does the same job, though chopped jelly clogs anything narrow.
- The tin cutter "bent to the shape"Tinsmiths made cutters to order; today, trim around each pear-shaped fillet freehand with the tip of a knife dipped in hot water, or use a plain oval cutter and accept the shape it gives.
- Timing and holdingAllow a day: poach and press one afternoon, glaze and set overnight, cut and plate close to service. Cooked poultry in aspic should stay refrigerated and be eaten within two days; the jelly is a garnish, not a preservative, whatever Victorian larder practice implied.
- The digressionEverything from "The fact is" onward is the author talking about salads in English novels and has nothing to do with the dish. Stop reading at the slice of lemon.
This is Jessup Whitehead territory — the Chicago trade manuals of the 1880s and 90s, written for hotel and restaurant cooks — and the entry shows both his practical bent and his habit of wandering off into literature mid-page. The technique itself is French garde-manger work simplified for a working kitchen: rather than lifting the raw fillets and braising them in wine, as the recipe itself notes a more ambitious cook would, the breasts come off a boiled fowl and are pressed cold, which any cook with a stockpot and two dishes could manage. Aspic in this period was a mark of a serious cold table, the whole point being clarity and clean edges; before commercial powdered gelatin was universal the jelly came from calves' feet or a long-reduced stock, and its "amber" color was the color of that reduction. The literary flight that follows refers to Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth and to A History of Our Own Times, and the derivation of "cold slaw" from Dutch and Flemish koolsla that he ends on is broadly right, though the recipe's own gloss — slaw as a pronunciation of salade, cold from kohl — is folk etymology dressed up as dictionary authority.