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Individual Chicken Salads in Aspic
Cover bottom of individual moulds set in ice-water with aspic jelly mixture. When jelly is firm decorate with yolks and whites of "hard-boiled" eggs cooked as for Harlequin Slices (see p. 147) and truffles cut in fancy shapes, or pistachio nuts blanched and cut in halves. Cover decorations with aspic mixture, being careful not to disarrange the designs. Finely chop cold cooked fowl (preferably breastmeat), moisten with Mayonnaise to which is added a small quantity of dissolved granulated gelatine, shape in balls, put a ball in each mould, and add gradually aspic mixture to fill moulds. Chill thoroughly, remove to lettuce leaves, and arrange around a dish of Mayonnaise Dressing.
This is an assembly recipe rather than a cooking one: everything hinges on building the mould in thin, fully set layers. Fannie Farmer assumes you already have aspic jelly and mayonnaise made from elsewhere in the book.
- The hinge: layer by layerEach addition of aspic must be nearly cold and syrupy, and the layer beneath it must be fully firm, or the decorations float and the design blurs. Add the final fill a spoonful at a time down the side of the mould, not over the top of the chicken ball.
- Aspic jellyThe recipe simply assumes an aspic jelly made elsewhere in the book: a clarified, well-seasoned stock set with gelatine. A modern equivalent is about 1 tablespoon (1 envelope, 7 g) powdered gelatine per 2 cups of strong stock, which unmoulds cleanly without being rubbery. Bloom it in cold stock, warm to dissolve, and never boil.
- Individual mouldsThe size is not given; small moulds of this kind typically hold something in the region of 1/2 to 2/3 cup. Small ramekins, dariole moulds, or a muffin tin lined with plastic wrap all work. Setting them in a shallow pan of ice water, as directed, is still the fastest way to fix each layer.
- "Hard-boiled" eggs cooked as for Harlequin SlicesThe cross-reference points to the book's own method for cooking the eggs; what that involves is not stated here. In practice, simply slice a firm hard-cooked egg and cut rounds, diamonds, or crescents from the white, then sieve or slice the yolk.
- TrufflesThen available tinned; now expensive. Black olive, blanched leek green, a sliver of roasted red pepper, or the pistachios the recipe already offers give the same graphic contrast.
- "Cold cooked fowl"Fowl meant a mature stewing hen, poached and cooled. Poached or roasted chicken breast is the direct substitute; roughly 1 1/2 cups finely chopped meat should fill about six small moulds.
- Gelatine in the mayonnaiseA teaspoon of dissolved gelatine stirred into roughly 1/2 cup mayonnaise is enough to let the chopped chicken hold a ball. Add it while barely warm and work quickly, or it sets into strings.
- Raw-egg mayonnaiseThe book's mayonnaise is uncooked yolk. If serving to anyone pregnant, elderly, or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs or a commercial mayonnaise.
- Yield and holdingNo yield is given; the quantities here suggest about six individual moulds, served as a luncheon course. Aspic and dressed chicken are both good bacterial media: keep the moulds refrigerated until the moment of unmoulding and do not let the finished platter stand at room temperature more than an hour.
Aspic work like this belonged to the era when a cold luncheon was judged largely by how it looked, and the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book devotes real space to it because Fannie Farmer was training women who might have to produce a company dish without a professional cook in the house. The techniques are borrowed from French garde-manger practice — decorated chaud-froid and moulded jellies — but scaled down to individual portions that could be turned out in advance and set on lettuce leaves without further fuss. Packaged granulated gelatine, which reached American grocers in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, is much of what made such a recipe printable for a domestic audience at all; earlier cooks would have had to boil down calves' feet for their own jelly. The taste for shimmering moulded salads it represents lasted, in various forms, well past the middle of the twentieth century.