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Chaudfroid of Chicken
Divide in five pieces each, three roasted chickens (rather underdone), two wings, two legs and one breastpiece; remove the skin and some of the bones. Put three-quarters of a pint of yellow sauce in a saucepan, warm it and also warm half the quantity of aspic jelly; stand the pan on ice and stir with a wooden spoon until the sauce thickens; then take the pan off; dip the pieces of fowl one by one into the sauce and arrange them on a baking-sheet. Dip some slices of truffles in the sauce and with these decorate the sides of a plain border-mould; fill the mould gradually with sauce, surround it with ice and let it set. Wipe around the mould, turn the jelly out on a dish and fill the hollow of the border with a wooden support, having previously covered it with white paper. Trim the pieces of fowl, mask with a layer of jelly, dish on the support, and serve.
Chaudfroid of Goose's Fat Liver Cutlets A jar of Strasburg fat livers will be required for this dish. Remove the fat and keep it on ice for a few hours. When quite firm, divide the preparation into three equal portions, trim and cut them crosswise into slices, giving each the shape of cutlets as nearly as possible. Coat the cutlets with transparent chaudfroid sauce and leave them until cool. Fix a support of fat in the center of a bread-support and surround it with chopped aspic jelly. Trim the cutlets, fix some paper frills on the thin ends and arrange them in an upright circle on the bread-support, supported by the chopped jelly. Decorate the top of the support with an ornamental attelette, or fix bread-support on a dish having previously garnished it with a border of fat.
This is a cold buffet centerpiece from the era when the garde-manger ruled the hotel kitchen, and most of its vocabulary has fallen out of use. One instruction, however, puts it out of reach: the chickens are roasted deliberately underdone and then finished, held and served cold.
- Why it fails: underdone poultry, served coldThe birds are roasted "rather underdone," jointed, dipped in a sauce cooled over ice, and then set with jelly and served without any further cooking. Nothing in the sequence brings the chicken to a temperature that would kill Salmonella or Campylobacter, and the repeated trimming, dipping and decorating of raw-centered meat give the organisms plenty of opportunity. Use a current recipe for cold poached or roasted chicken in aspic if you want this dish.
- The aspic itselfPeriod aspic was clarified stock jelly, usually set by collagen from calf's feet and veal bones, though prepared gelatine was also available by this date; it was worked over ice for as long as the decorating took. A commercial jar of foie gras, as in the second recipe, is shelf-stable; a homemade meat jelly handled and reworked over several hours is not.
- "Yellow sauce"Most likely sauce allemande: a velouté finished with egg yolks and cream, which gives it the pale gold color. Thinned with aspic and stirred over ice until it coats a spoon, it becomes a chaud-froid sauce.
- MeasuresThree-quarters of a pint is 1.5 cups; "half the quantity" of aspic is therefore about three-quarters of a cup.
- Border-mould and supportA border-mould is a plain ring mould. The "wooden support" and "bread-support" are the shaped blocks of wood or dense fried bread that garde-manger cooks used to raise food above the platter — structural scaffolding, never eaten, and the paper wrapping was there to keep the wood off the food.
- AtteletteAlso spelled hâtelet: a decorative skewer, often silver, carrying a crest or a spray of truffle and cockscomb, driven into the top of a cold showpiece.
- ScaleThree chickens broken into five pieces each yields fifteen pieces, which is buffet quantity rather than dinner-party quantity — a reminder that this is a display piece for a long table.
Chaud-froid means "hot-cold": a dish made with a hot sauce that is served cold, the sauce fortified with enough aspic to set into a smooth ivory or amber mask. The name is generally traced to late eighteenth-century French kitchens, and a much-repeated story attributes it to a dinner at the household of the Maréchal de Luxembourg interrupted before service, the sauced fowl eaten cold the next day — traditional rather than documented. What is certain is that Carême and his successors turned the technique into the backbone of grand cold cookery, and by the 1890s it belonged to the garde-manger, the cold-kitchen department whose work was judged on appearance first. Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf ran exactly that kind of brigade, and the truffle slices, ring moulds, paper frills and ornamental skewers here have less to do with flavor than with building something that could stand up under electric light for an evening's banquet service."}