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Chicken Fillets with Aspic Jelly
Take six good-sized chicken fillets, cut off the minion fillets and the thin skin of the larger ones, form these into equal shapes and put them into a sautepan with a little butter, giving them a slightly curved inclination when in the pan, pour over a little more butter, cover with paper, and cook them until quite done. Take the minion fillets, trim and contise them with a few small pieces of cooked beef tongue; put them into a sautepan with a little butter to cook, giving them a curved shape in the pan. In the meantime put a circular rice socle on a dish, mask it with Montpelier butter, and again on its center place a small socle two inches in diameter and three and a half inches in height, and mask this again with more Montpelier butter. Take the fillets out of the pan when done, place them on a strainer to drain, and put them when they are perfectly cold into hot chicken chaudfroid sauce, and then when they are cold put them on a dish on the larger rice socle, leaning against the smaller one, with a truffle cut a quarter of an inch thick and of the size of the end of the fillets placed between them. Garnish the top of the socle with chopped aspic jelly, and serve.
This is garde-manger work from the era of the grand hotel buffet: chicken poached in butter, coated in a cold-setting white sauce, and displayed on a moulded pedestal. The hinge is temperature — the chicken must be cold and dry and the chaudfroid warm and just fluid, or the coating will slide off in streaks.
- Fillets and minion filletsThe "fillet" is the boneless breast; the "minion fillet" (filet mignon de volaille) is the small tenderloin strip lying beneath it. Six good-sized fillets means the breasts of three chickens; the recipe gives no number of servings.
- ContiseTo contise is to make shallow slits in the surface and inset thin slivers of a contrasting ingredient — here cooked beef tongue, elsewhere truffle or pickled tongue. It is purely decorative and shows as a pattern through the pale coating.
- Cooking in butter under paperThis is butter-poaching, not sautéing. Low heat, a buttered paper cartouche pressed on the surface, and no colour at all: any browning ruins the white finish. Cook to 165F at the thickest point, roughly 10-15 minutes for a breast.
- The curved shapeThe fillets are set in the pan bent into a crescent so they hold that shape when cold and can lean against the centre socle. A weighted plate or a shaped mould in the pan does the job.
- SocleA socle is a pedestal. A rice socle is very stiff cooked rice, often bound and pressed into a mould, chilled hard, then coated. It is a display base rather than something anyone eats; a modern cook can substitute a chilled disc of firm rice or simply serve the fillets flat.
- Montpelier butterBeurre de Montpellier: butter pounded with blanched herbs (parsley, chervil, tarragon, chives, watercress), spinach for colour, anchovy, capers, gherkin, shallot and sometimes hard egg yolk. It is used here as a green masking paste, spread smooth with a warm palette knife.
- Chicken chaudfroid sauceA velouté made with chicken stock, enriched with cream, and set with dissolved gelatine or reduced aspic so it firms as it cools. The recipe calls for putting the cold fillets into the sauce "hot"; in practice it is worked just warm and fluid — around 90-95F is a workable modern figure. Two or three thin coats, chilling between each, beat one thick one.
- Aspic jellyClarified, well-gelled chicken stock. Chopped aspic is simply set jelly diced on a wet knife for a glittering garnish. Powdered gelatine at roughly 2 to 2.5 teaspoons per pint of stock gives a jelly firm enough to chop cleanly.
- Keeping it coldEverything from the moment the chicken leaves the pan happens at refrigerator temperature. Assemble on a chilled dish, return it to the cold between stages, and do not let the finished piece stand out on a buffet for more than a couple of hours.
Chaudfroid — literally "hot-cold" — is the classic method for presenting cooked meat cold under a set sauce, and its invention is traditionally credited to an eighteenth-century French kitchen accident in which a fricassée was left to go cold and found to be better for it. Whatever its origin, by the 1890s it was the backbone of the garde-manger's repertoire, and dishes like this one existed as much to be looked at as eaten: the ranked crescents of white chicken, the black truffle spacers, the green herb butter and the glittering chopped jelly were the visual language of the hotel cold buffet. The vocabulary here — minion fillets, contise, socle, Montpelier butter, mask — is the house language of the professional compendia of the period, a reminder that a great deal of nineteenth-century professional cookery was architecture in food, built for the sideboard and the long dining room table.