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Truffles (Pieces cooked chicken shaped)
6 pieces cooked chicken, shaped in form of cutlets Make a sauce of butter, flour, and stock; add egg yolk diluted with cream, lemon juice, salt and pepper; then add dissolved gelatine. Dip chicken in sauce which has been allowed to cool. When chicken has cooled, garnish upper side with truffles cut in shapes. Brush over with aspic jelly mixture, and chill. Arrange a bed of lettuce; in centre pile cold cooked asparagus tips or celery cut in small pieces, marinated with French Dressing, and place chicken at base of salad.
Moulded Salmon, Cucumber Sauce 1 can salmon ½ tablespoons melted butter Yolks 2 eggs 1½ tablespoon salt 1½ tablespoons sugar 3/4 cup milk ½ tablespoon flour 1/4 cup vinegar 1 teaspoon mustard ¾ tablespoon granulated Few grains cayenne gelatine 2 tablespoons cold water Remove salmon from can, rinse thoroughly with hot water, and separate in flakes. Mix dry ingredients, add egg yolks, butter, milk, and vinegar. Cook over boiling water, stirring CHAUD-FROID OF EGGS. - Page 385.
CAPON IN ASPIC GARNISHED WITH COOKED YOLKS AND WHITES OF EGGS CUT IN FANCY SHAPES, PISTACHIO NUTS, AND TRUFFLES. - Page 384. HARVARD PUDDING SERVED WITH CRUSHED BERRIES AND WHIPPED CREAM. - Page 400.
SNOWBALLS GARNISHED WITH STRAWBERRIES AND SERVED WITH CRUSHED STRAWBERRIES AND WHIPPED CREAM. - Page 401. constantly until mixture thickens. Add gelatine soaked in cold water. Strain, and add to salmon. Fill individual mould, chill, and serve with Cucumber Sauce II. Beat one-half cup heavy cream until stiff, add one-fourth teaspoon salt, a few grains pepper, and gradually two tablespoons vinegar; then add one cucumber, pared, chopped, and drained through cheese cloth.
Moulded Chicken, Sauterne Jelly Cover a four-pound fowl with two quarts cold water, and add four slices carrot, one onion stuck with eight cloves, two stalks celery, bit of bay leaf, one-half teaspoon peppercorns, and one tablespoon salt. Bring quickly to boiling-point, and let simmer until meat is tender. Remove meat from bones, and finely chop. Reduce stock to three-fourths cup, cool, and remove fat. Soak one teaspoon granulated gelatine in one teaspoon cold water, and dissolve in stock which has been reheated. Add to meat, and season with salt, pepper, celery salt, lemon juice, and onion juice. Pack solidly into a slightly buttered one-pound baking powder tin, and chill. Remove from tin, cut in thin slices, and arrange around Sauterne Jelly, beaten with a fork until light.
When making Sauterne Jelly (see p. 420) to serve with meat, use but three tablespoons sugar.
These are cold buffet dishes from the era of the chaud-froid: cooked meat masked in a thickened, gelatine-set sauce, decorated, then glazed with clear aspic. The work is all in the temperature of the sauce at the moment of coating.
- The hinge: sauce temperatureThe masking sauce must be cooled until it just begins to thicken and coats the back of a spoon in an opaque layer. Too warm and it slides off the chicken; too cool and it sets in lumps. Set the bowl over ice water and stir, and warm it briefly if it goes too far.
- No quantities for the sauceThe chaud-froid sauce is given without measurements. A workable proportion for six cutlets is 2 tablespoons each butter and flour, 1 cup chicken stock, 1 egg yolk in 1/4 cup cream, and about 1 tablespoon gelatine softened in cold water, though the original leaves this to the cook's judgement.
- Aspic glazeThe final brushing coat should be liquid but cold, only just above its setting point, and applied in two or three thin layers with chilling between. Chill the plate itself; the decoration shifts if the glaze is warm enough to soften the sauce beneath.
- TrufflesFresh truffle is not needed for cut-out garnish. Canned or jarred black truffle slices, or thin rounds of black olive, give the same graphic effect against the pale sauce, which is the whole point of the decoration.
- Gelatine strengthGranulated gelatine of this period seems to behave much like modern unflavoured powder: one envelope is about 2 1/4 teaspoons (often rounded up to a scant tablespoon) and sets roughly 2 cups of liquid to a firm slice. For a coating sauce you want it slightly firmer than a jelly you would eat with a spoon.
- Salt in the salmon mixtureThe dressing for the moulded salmon calls for salt at tablespoon scale against 3/4 cup milk and one can of fish, which is far more than the mixture needs. Season by taste, starting at a teaspoon or less.
- Canned salmonThe instruction to rinse the salmon with hot water was most likely to wash away the oil it was packed in. Modern canned salmon needs only draining, though removing skin and vertebrae is still worth the minute.
- Reducing the fowl stockTwo quarts of water reduced to three-quarters of a cup is a long, hard reduction, and it is what makes the moulded chicken slice cleanly. Do not salt again until the reduction is finished.
- The mouldA one-pound baking powder tin is roughly a 2-cup straight-sided cylinder, chosen so the set loaf could be sliced into neat rounds. A small loaf tin or a tall can of similar volume does the same job.
- Holding and servingEverything here is served cold and should be assembled the day of the meal, kept refrigerated, and out of the warm room no longer than the time it takes to eat.
Chaud-froid -- literally "hot-cold" -- is a French technique, codified in nineteenth-century professional kitchens, in which a hot sauce is enriched with gelatine, cooled, and used to mask cold cooked poultry, eggs or fish, which is then decorated and sealed under clear aspic. Recipes of this kind entered American domestic cookbooks from professional practice in the later nineteenth century, and this book includes it among its cold, composed dishes for a luncheon or supper table. The moulded salmon in the same group shows the domestic end of the same idea: canned salmon, which Pacific canneries and rail distribution had made cheap and widely available by 1900, bound with a cooked boiled dressing and a little gelatine so it could be turned out in individual moulds. Both rely on gelatine sold in granulated form, a relatively recent convenience at the time -- earlier cooks drew their own from calves' feet -- and the fashion for moulded, glazed, garnished cold food in this period is usually associated with that packet on the grocer's shelf.