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Moulded Russian Salad
Reduce strong consommé so that when cold it will be jellylike in consistency. Set individual moulds in pan of icewater, pour in consommé one-fourth inch deep; when firm , decorate bottom and sides of moulds with cold cooked carrots, beets and potatoes cut in fancy shapes. Add consommé to cover vegetables, and as soon as firm fill moulds twothirds full of any cooked vegetable that may be at hand. Add consommé by spoonfuls, allowing it to become firm between the additions, and put in enough to cover vegetables .
Chill thoroughly, remove from moulds, and arrange on lettuce leaves. Serve with Mayonnaise Dressing.
An aspic salad that depends entirely on the consommé setting on its own. Everything else is patience and layering.
- The hinge: a stock that gelsThe recipe assumes a homemade consomme built on veal knuckle, calf's foot or a gelatinous beef stock, reduced until a spoonful chilled on a saucer sets firm. Most commercial cartoned broth will not set firmly however far it is reduced. If your stock does not gel on its own, soften about 1 tablespoon powdered gelatin per 2 cups of cold consomme and dissolve it in the warm liquid.
- Test before you commitChill a teaspoon of the reduced consommé on a cold plate for five minutes. It should hold a clean edge but yield to a fingertip. Too firm and the salad eats like rubber; too soft and it collapses on unmoulding.
- Keep the consommé liquid, barelyHold the working consommé in a bowl set over warm water, around 90-100F. If it thickens in the jug you will not get thin, even layers, and each spoonful must be cool enough not to melt the layer beneath it.
- The ice-water bathThis is doing the work of a refrigerator. Individual moulds in a pan of ice and water will set a quarter-inch layer in roughly five to ten minutes. The refrigerator works too but takes considerably longer, and the recipe involves a great many layers.
- Decorating the mouldCut the carrot, beet and potato shapes very thin so they lie flat, and place them face-down with the tip of a knife or a skewer, since the pattern is read through the jelly from the outside. Set beets in last or in their own layer, or they will bleed pink into everything.
- "Any cooked vegetable at hand"In practice this means peas, green beans cut short, diced turnip, cauliflower florets, asparagus tips. Drain them thoroughly and season them first: unsalted vegetables suspended in jelly taste of nothing.
- UnmouldingDip the mould to the rim in hot water for three or four seconds, no longer, run a thin knife round the top edge, and invert onto a chilled plate. If the jelly slumps, the consommé was too weak to begin with.
- Yield and timingRoughly 3 cups of consomme, allowing for what clings to the pan, will fill six half-cup moulds packed with vegetables. Allow two hours of building and setting, and make them the day before if convenient; they keep covered for about 24 hours.
- The mayonnaiseThe book's mayonnaise dressing is raw-yolk and thick. A modern jarred mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of lemon juice and cream sits well against the cold jelly; avoid anything sweet.
Russian salad, salade russe, entered international restaurant cookery in the later nineteenth century as a composed dish of diced cooked vegetables bound with mayonnaise; the version most often cited as its ancestor is the Olivier salad, associated with a chef of that name working in Moscow in the 1860s, though the connection is traditional rather than firmly documented. By the time this book was compiled the name had come to mean, in American kitchens, simply a mixed vegetable salad dressed with mayonnaise, and the Russian element was more or less decorative. Setting it in consomme jelly reflects a broader enthusiasm of the period: aspic work was a mark of a trained cook, moulds and jelly bags were common equipment, and a salad that could be built in layers and turned out whole gave a household with no professional chef a way to put something architectural on the table. The technique fell away in the second half of the twentieth century, for a mix of reasons that probably included changing tastes and the decline of home stock made from bones that gel.