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Crayfish Salad with Aspic
Choose three dozen crayfish and boil them; when done, take out and let cool. Remove the meat from the claws and tails, place it in a basin, add a little seasoning, and cover with oil and vinegar. Remove the flesh from the small claws, also from the trimmings of the tails, mix them into a lettuce and cress salad cut up into shreds, season with salt and add a little mayonnaise sauce to thicken. Take a plain border mould and put ice all round it. Then divide four hard-boiled eggs into halves, dip them on one side only into a little half-set aspic jelly and put them into the mould in an upright position with the points directed to the bottom, cutting away a portion of the sides to the shape of the side of the mould. In the course of a few minutes fill the mould up with aspic jelly and allow it to get cold and set; then about fifteen minutes before it is required, turn it out onto a dish (quite cold). Arrange the salad in the form of a pyramid in the cavity of the border. Take the tails, one at a time, and with the aid of a larding-needle, place them in a circle on the salad. Garnish an attelette skewer with a truffle and put it in the top. Serve a sauceboatful of mayonnaise sauce with this.
This is a composed cold platter rather than a bowl of salad: an aspic ring set with halved eggs, filled with dressed crayfish and greens. The hinge is temperature — the mould must be fully set and the serving dish genuinely cold, or the whole structure slumps within minutes.
- Three dozen crayfishWhole crayfish yield very little meat; three dozen small ones will probably give something in the region of half a pound of picked meat in total, a first-course quantity rather than a main dish. Substituting about 1 lb of cooked shell-on crawfish tails, or small shrimp, is closer in yield than in flavour but works for the assembly.
- Boiling timeThe recipe leaves this to judgement. Salted water at a rolling boil, a few minutes until the shells turn red and the tails curl tight, then straight out. Held longer they toughen and the tail meat shreds when you handle it.
- Aspic jellyThe recipe assumes clarified stock already to hand, set by its own gelatin. A modern working equivalent is about 1 quart of well-flavoured clear stock with roughly 2 tablespoons of powdered gelatin — enough to unmould cleanly — seasoned assertively, since cold jelly tastes flatter than warm stock. "Half-set" means syrupy and just beginning to hold a line, the stage where it clings to the eggs instead of running off.
- Border mouldA plain ring mould. Packing ice around it was the era's chilling method; a refrigerator does the same job, though a bowl of ice water will set the jelly faster.
- Turning it outDip the mould base in warm water for a few seconds, no more, then invert onto a plate that has been chilled. The recipe directs that this be done about fifteen minutes before serving, which keeps the ring cold and firm for as long as possible before the salad goes in.
- Larding-needle and atteletteThe needle is used only as a placing tool, to lift each tail and set it in the ring without breaking it; long tweezers or a thin skewer do the same. An attelette (or hatelet) is a decorative silver skewer with an ornamental top — any small skewer with a truffle slice, or a black olive, gives the same vertical accent.
- DressingTwo separate treatments: the meat from the large claws and the whole tails sit in oil and vinegar while you build the mould, effectively a marinade, and should be drained before the tails are set on top; the small-claw meat and tail trimmings are what go into the shredded lettuce and cress with mayonnaise. Cress here is garden cress or watercress, shredded fine.
- ServingA first-course or luncheon dish for a small number. Keep the extra mayonnaise cold and pass it separately, as directed, rather than spooning it over the aspic.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) records the Waldorf's kitchen at the height of the aspic era, when a chilled moulded jelly was the clearest possible display of a hotel's resources: clarified stock, dependable ice, and enough labour to pick three dozen crayfish and set each tail in place with a larding needle. Crayfish were a standard European garnish — écrevisses appear throughout nineteenth-century French service, and American rivers supplied them freely. The attelette skewer topped with truffle belongs to the older grande-cuisine decorative tradition, generally traced to Carême and his successors: an ornamental garnish meant to be admired on the sideboard and removed before eating. Dishes like this one are generally read as the New York hotel kitchen translating Parisian grande cuisine for a clientele that wanted to be seen dining as Europeans did.