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Mayonaise of Chicken
Bone 4 young but plump chickens. There need be no difficulty in this. First cut down the back and then cut close to the bones. It makes no difference if you do cut through the skin once in a while. Carve through the hip joints, inside, and take the leg bones out after those of the carcass. Wash the chickens in cold water, dry them, lay out on a table and dredge plentifully with pepper and salt. Then lay two together, the white meat of one on the dark meat of the other, double or roll them up loosely, tie round with twine and boil them in the stock boiler an hour.
When done take off the twine and lay the chickens out flat on two large platters, place other platters on top, set in a cold place and a weight on to press them to about an inch in thickness.
When quite cold cut the edges of the pressed fowls square and divide them in shapes all of one size. Oblongs and parallelograms are most in style, and they laid not straight in the dish but slantwise, leaving the ends of the dish for the garnish. Prepare some mayonaise of savory jelly by mixing thick mayonaise with a third as much aspic jelly and when about to set pour a coating over each piece of the chicken placed on large dishes for the purpose. Prepare the small dishes--25 or 30 of them--with a bed sometimes of chopped green salad material or white celery, at others with finely minced eggs. Mince also a spoonful of pickled blood beets, the same of green pickles and mix them with a like quantity of minced yolk of eggs, but only the minute before using, less the beets color them all.
When the dressing on the chicken is perfectly cold and set take each piece on a fork in the end and lightly dip the upper side in the minced beets etc., on a plate, and place it on its dish. At each end place a slice of lemon. Jelly mixed with cream sauce in proportion to make it set can be used in place of the mayonaise.
Chickens cut up in joints, after boiling and cooling, and the pieces smoothly trimmed, can be dressed as above and for a large dish may be piled around a center of lettuce salad.
A hotel-scale cold buffet dish: boned chicken pressed into a slab, cut into geometric pieces, coated in mayonnaise stiffened with aspic, and plated individually. The instructions assume a commercial kitchen with a stock boiler and thirty small dishes on hand.
- ScaleFour chickens yield the 25-30 individual plates mentioned. For a home version, one 3-4 lb bird boned and pressed gives roughly six to eight portions; a quarter batch of the coating is plenty.
- The hinge: aspic ratioMayonnaise cut with one-third its volume of aspic must be poured at the moment it begins to thicken. Too warm and it runs off the chicken; fully set and it will not coat. Keep the bowl over tepid water and work in small amounts.
- "Boil them in the stock boiler an hour"This means poaching in stock at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, which shreds the rolls. An hour suits the small "young but plump" birds of the period; a modern 4 lb chicken boned and rolled needs about 45-60 minutes to reach 165F at the thickest part of the roll.
- PressingTwo platters and a weight in a cold place is a refrigerator overnight with a foil-wrapped brick or a few cans on top. An inch thick is the target; the gelatin in the skin and connective tissue is what glues the slab together, so keep the skin on where you can when boning.
- AspicSavory jelly here is reduced, clarified chicken stock set with its own gelatin or with added sheet gelatin. Commercial aspic powder works; unflavored gelatin bloomed in strong stock, about one envelope per two cups, gives a jelly that will set, and more if you want it firm enough to slice.
- "Pickled blood beets" and "green pickles"Pickled red beets and cucumber pickles, chopped fine. The warning about mixing them only at the last minute is sound: beet juice bleeds into the egg yolk and grey-pinks the whole garnish within minutes.
- Raw yolk in the mayonnaiseThe coating is uncooked mayonnaise on cold cooked chicken and will sit out on a buffet. Use pasteurized eggs or commercial mayonnaise as the base, and keep the finished plates refrigerated until service.
- Cream sauce variantThe alternative is a chaud-froid: béchamel or velouté blended with enough aspic to set, poured the same way. It gives an opaque ivory coating rather than the yellow of mayonnaise.
Cold, coated, geometrically cut meats were the backbone of the late nineteenth-century American hotel buffet, and this entry belongs to that world rather than the domestic one — the reference to a stock boiler and to twenty-five or thirty small dishes marks it as banquet work. "Mayonnaise of chicken" in this period could mean a dressed salad, but it was also used, as here, for a garnished cold entrée in the French service, closely related to the chaud-froid the recipe offers as a substitute. The technique of setting a sauce with aspic so it clings to cold meat is generally traced to French professional kitchens of the earlier nineteenth century, and it reached American hotels through the chefs and the printed manuals that followed them. The pressed, boned slab cut into oblongs also reflects a practical concern: uniform portions that could be plated quickly and identically for a room full of diners.