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Glazing for Meat
Put a small quantity of jellied stock over the fire, add a little burnt sugar, and simmer until it is like syrup. Use warm, putting it on with a brush. (If you have no jellied stock add one-quarter ounce of gelatine to liquid stock and proceed as above directed.) Glazing may also be made by boiling one quart of consommé down to one-half pint. Half-glaze is made by boiling consommé down to one-half. When wanted put in a small saucepan and melt in another of boiling water.
This is the classic glace de viande reduction, given in shorthand for cooks who kept stockpots going. The whole thing hinges on the gelatine content of the stock, not on the sugar.
- Jellied stockMeans a stock that sets firm when cold, which comes from long simmering of veal knuckle, calf's foot or chicken feet. A stock that stays liquid in the refrigerator will never glaze properly no matter how far you reduce it.
- The gelatine shortcutA quarter ounce is roughly one envelope of powdered gelatine, about 7 g, bloomed in cold liquid before it goes into the warm stock. It is a stopgap and gives shine without the depth of a true reduction.
- Burnt sugarPeriod shorthand for caramel colouring: sugar cooked to dark mahogany and let down with a little hot water. It is there for colour and a faint bitterness, not sweetness, and the recipe calls only for 'a little'.
- The reduction ratioA quart boiled to half a pint is a four-to-one reduction, roughly 950 ml down to 240 ml. The book's 'half-glaze' is only a two-to-one reduction and stays pourable when warm.
- Salt at the endThe original says nothing about seasoning. Reduce unsalted or lightly salted stock, then correct at the very end, since a four-to-one reduction concentrates salt fourfold.
- Do not scorchAs it thickens the glaze catches easily. Move to a smaller pan as the volume drops, keep the heat low, and stir the last few minutes.
- The double boiler"Put in a small saucepan and melt in another of boiling water" is a water bath. Set glaze is stiff enough to slice and will burn if reheated over direct flame.
- Yield and keepingA quart of consomme gives about a cup (the half pint the recipe specifies), enough to coat one large roast or a platter of cold cuts. Chilled and covered it keeps a week or two, and it freezes well in ice-cube trays.
Meat glaze is one of the foundation preparations of nineteenth-century professional cookery, the residue of a kitchen economy in which bones and trimmings went into a stockpot that never fully cooled. Careme and after him Escoffier codified the sequence of stock, consomme, half-glaze and glaze, and American household books of this period took it up, often with the French terms half-translated as here. The Butterick book, sold by a company known for its dress patterns, is teaching a restaurant technique to a domestic reader: the mirror shine on a cold ham or a moulded tongue at a buffet supper was a mark of a competent table. The gelatine substitution in the parenthesis suggests a domestic audience, commercial powdered gelatine being cheap and widely sold by then.