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Chaud-froid of Chicken (Tablespoons butter tablespoons)
2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1 cup White Stock Yolk one egg 2 tablespoons cream 1 tablespoon lemon juice Salt and pepper ¾ teaspoon granulated gelatine dissolved in one tablespoon hot water Aspic jelly
This is the coating sauce for a chaud-froid — cooked chicken masked in a velouté set with gelatine, then glazed with aspic. The list gives quantities; the handling is what decides whether the finish is glossy or grainy.
- The hinge: never boil after the yolk goes inCook the butter and flour to a blond roux, whisk in the hot white stock and simmer it smooth, then temper the yolk with the cream and lemon juice and stir it in off the heat. Return it only to the gentlest heat, below a simmer, or the sauce curdles and no amount of straining recovers the shine.
- White stockA clear, unbrowned chicken or veal stock. Use a good low-sodium chicken stock, reduced a little if it is thin; a dark or heavily roasted stock will muddy the white coating.
- The gelatineThe quantity as printed reads as three-quarters of a teaspoon of granulated gelatine bloomed in a tablespoon of hot water — roughly a third of a modern envelope. That is enough to set one cup of already-thick sauce to a coating consistency, not to a firm jelly.
- Working temperatureStrain the finished sauce and let it cool, stirring, until it coats the back of a spoon and just begins to thicken at the edges of the bowl. Too warm and it runs off the chicken; too cool and it goes on in ridges. Set the bowl over warm water to hold it there.
- Preparing the chickenThe pieces must be cold, dry and skinned or trimmed neatly — poached or roasted breast and boned thigh, chilled thoroughly on a rack over a tray. Coat, chill until set, then coat again for an even mask.
- Aspic jellyThe final clear glaze, brushed or spooned over the set white coating once any decoration (tarragon leaves, truffle, pimiento) is in place. A clarified stock set with gelatine, applied at the point where it is syrupy but still pours.
- Yield and servingOne cup of sauce is enough to mask a small platter's worth of chicken pieces, though the original gives no yield. It is a cold buffet dish: assemble a day ahead, keep refrigerated, and bring out no more than half an hour before serving.
Chaud-froid — "hot-cold" — names a dish cooked hot and served cold under a sauce that sets to a smooth mask, and the term is generally traced to eighteenth-century French practice, with the elaborate decorated versions codified in the professional kitchens of the nineteenth. Its appearance in a Boston Cooking-School book reflects how thoroughly the American middle-class table of the period had absorbed French entrée cookery: the sauce is a plain velouté, but stiffened with gelatine and glazed with aspic it becomes a centrepiece for a cold luncheon or buffet. Commercial granulated gelatine, cheap and reliable by the end of the nineteenth century, is what put a dish of this kind within reach of a household cook who had no calf's foot simmering on the range.