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Aspic of Oysters
Put three or four dozen large oysters into a stewpan with sufficient white wine or sherry to cover them and let cook gently until firm. Drain, trim, put them in a basin and season with a little salt and the juice of a lemon squeezed over. Set a mould in a box or tin of powdered ice and pour in a thin layer of warmed jelly. Let this set and then lay oysters symmetrically over it to within one-fourth inch of the edge all round. Pour over sufficient aspic to cover these and allow it to set and then repeat the layer of oysters until the mould is quite full, taking care that the aspic shall cover the last layer of oysters without overflowing. Allow this to stand for an hour in the ice and then dip the mould into hot water, removing quickly, and then turn out onto a cold dish. Garnish round with chopped aspic jelly or ornament with croutons of aspic in two or three colors of brown, red and yellow. Serve with a rich mayonnaise sauce.
A cold buffet piece from the Waldorf's larder, built in layers so the oysters sit suspended in clear jelly. Almost everything that can go wrong here happens in the first thirty seconds of cooking.
- "Until firm" is shorter than it soundsOysters poached in wine are done when the edges ruffle and they just plump, roughly 1 to 2 minutes at a bare simmer. Held longer they contract into rubber, and in a clear jelly the shrinkage is visible as well as unpleasant.
- AspicThe recipe assumes you already have it: strong, clarified veal or fish stock that sets firm on its own, or is helped with gelatin. For a modern version, one packet of powdered gelatin (about 7 g, roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons) per 2 cups of well-flavoured stock gives a standard set; for a jelly firm enough to unmould and to support layers of oysters you will generally want rather more.
- "Warmed jelly"Melted and then cooled to barely tepid, near setting point. Poured hot it will melt the layer beneath and float the oysters out of position; poured cold it seizes in streaks.
- Powdered iceCrushed ice, packed round the mould in a bowl or tin. A refrigerator does the same work more slowly; each layer needs 15 to 20 minutes to set firm before the next goes on, and the whole mould still wants the full hour before turning out.
- Save the poaching wineThe oyster liquor and wine left in the pan are the most flavourful thing in the dish. Strain through a coffee filter or muslin and use it as part of the stock for the aspic, or the jelly will taste of nothing in particular.
- Coloured croutonsSmall shapes cut from sheets of aspic set thin on a tray. The brown is meat glaze or stock, the red tomato or beet, the yellow saffron or egg-tinted jelly. Purely decorative, and easily skipped in favour of chopped aspic alone.
- UnmouldingA three- or four-second dip in hot water, no more, then invert onto a chilled plate. Longer and the outer surface goes cloudy and slumps. If it resists, run a thin knife round the top edge to break the seal rather than dipping again.
- Yield and holdingThree or four dozen oysters fills a mould of roughly 1.5 to 2 quarts and serves 8 to 10 as a first course. Keep it refrigerated until the moment it goes to table; gelatin sets soft at room temperature and the dish is at its best straight from the cold.
Aspic was the display cooking of the late nineteenth-century hotel kitchen, a way of showing off both the stockpot and the icebox at once. Before commercial gelatin was common, the jelly came from long-simmered calf's feet or fish bones, clarified with egg white until it was glass-clear; the ability to produce and hold a large clear mould said as much about a house's ice supply as about its cook. Oscar Tschirky's book of the 1890s records the Waldorf's repertoire in a period when the beds of New York harbour and Long Island still supplied the city cheaply. Cold moulded pieces like this one belonged to the buffet and the supper table, and also appeared as cold entrees in ordinary service, set out whole to be admired before they were cut into. The taste for elaborate aspic work faded through the middle of the twentieth century, hastened by the vogue for suspending less deserving foods in gelatin.