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Aspic of Trout
Clean a good-sized fresh trout, draw it by the gills, wipe it inwardly, stuff it with fish forcemeat and truss the head. Place it in a saucepan with sufficient broth to cover it and boil until it is done. Have in readiness a piece of fried bread of an oval shape and the length of the fish and place it on a dish of the same shape. Allow the trout to get cold, draining it on a sieve and wipe it well with a cloth; cover over the bread with paper, put the fish on the top, supporting it with butter, glaze it with half-set aspic jelly, surround it with chopped jelly, and decorate the edge of the jelly with croutons of jelly. Garnish the base of the support with halves of hard-boiled eggs, interspersed with small lettuces cut in halves, and serve with mayonnaise sauce in a sauceboat.
This is a cold buffet centerpiece built the way a professional garde-manger built things in 1900: a whole poached fish set on a bread plinth, sealed under aspic. The construction is straightforward once you know that most of the assembly is scaffolding rather than food.
- Do not boil it"Boil until it is done" would shred a trout. Bring the broth to a bare simmer, slide the fish in, and hold it at 160-170F until the thickest part of the flesh and the forcemeat both read 145F, allowing roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness. A hard boil splits the skin and the stuffing bleeds out.
- Draw it by the gillsThe fish is gutted through the gill opening and throat so the belly stays closed and can hold forcemeat without stitching. Ask a fishmonger to do it, or make a small vent cut and accept a less seamless presentation.
- Fish forcemeatA workable modern reading is a mousseline: about 8 oz raw white fish or trout trimmings pureed with an egg white, seasoning, and 4-6 tablespoons cold cream, worked over ice. It must be cooked through with the fish, so keep the stuffing loose rather than packed.
- Aspic jellyClarified fish stock set with gelatin, about 2 to 2.5 teaspoons powdered gelatin per cup for a coating jelly that will hold at room temperature. "Half-set" means chilled to the consistency of raw egg white; spoon it over the cold, dry fish in two or three thin coats, chilling between each. Warm aspic slides off and cloudy aspic looks like nothing.
- The bread support is furnitureThe oval of fried bread, papered over and pinned down with butter, is a socle: a plinth to lift and level the fish. It is not intended to be eaten. A block of firm bread, or in a modern kitchen a rice-paper-covered board cut to shape, does the same job.
- Chopped jelly and croutons of jellySet a shallow tray of aspic firm, then chop some of it coarsely with a wet knife for the border and cut the rest into small triangles or diamonds for the edging. Both should be cut cold and arranged quickly; they weep once they warm.
- Keep it coldAspic-glazed fish is a refrigerator dish. Assemble on a chilled platter, hold it below 40F, and bring it out no more than half an hour before serving. The glaze is decorative, not preservative.
- YieldOne good-sized trout of 2-3 lb, with the eggs, lettuce hearts and mayonnaise, serves four to six as a cold first course.
Cold fish in aspic was the standard grammar of the hotel buffet when Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf dining rooms, and this entry reads as a straight transcription of French cuisine froide practice of the sort often traced to Carême and his successors: the fish poached and cooled, the socle of fried bread to give it height, the aspic glaze, the geometric croutons of jelly around the rim. Aspic itself is the gelatin of a long-simmered stock, here reinforced with added gelatin as the note at [3] specifies. The presentation was engineering as much as cookery, and the plinth hidden under paper and butter is a reminder that a nineteenth-century showpiece was judged on the platter, not on whether every element was edible. Trout, generally the American brook or the imported European variety, is said to have been a prestige freshwater fish on New York menus of the 1890s, and serving one whole and glazed was a way of showing the guest exactly what he had ordered.