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Glaze for Cold Fowl
Put into a saucepan five parts of veloute sauce to one of chicken stock, reduce to a glaze, thicken with the yolk of egg, pass through a sieve, when it is ready for use.
Glaze for Cold Hams and Tongues Put half a shin of beef in a saucepan with one gallon of water and boil for twelve hours. Boil a knuckle of veal in water until all the goodness is extracted; strain the liquors from the beef and veal, mix them together, seasoning with moderate quantities of salt, pepper and cloves, and boil until reduced to one pint. Strain the glaze through a fine hair-sieve and pour it into the jar. When cold tie it over and keep in a dry place. The glaze will keep good for ten or twelve months. A small portion of it should be warmed for use and brushed over the article with a feather.
Glaze for Cold Partridges or Woodcocks Put into a saucepan five parts of Spanish sauce with one part of game stock, reduce, pass it through a sieve and stir it into a little brown meat jelly. It will remain good for a long time if kept in a jar in a cool place.
Three separate glazes for a cold buffet, printed as one run-on entry. The vocabulary is straight out of the classic French kitchen, but the storage directions in the middle recipe are the reason this page cannot be followed as printed.
- The storage instruction is the problemA pint of strained beef-and-veal stock, poured into a jar, tied over once cold and "kept in a dry place" for ten or twelve months, is a low-acid meat product held at room temperature with no sterilising process. Under a covering that is merely tied over, mould and general spoilage are the likely outcome; where the set glaze creates oxygen-free conditions beneath the surface, Clostridium botulinum becomes a real risk, and its spores are not killed by the twelve-hour simmer while the toxin gives no smell or taste to warn you. Use a current recipe for meat glaze and its keeping instructions.
- Reduction is not preservationEven reduced this far, the result is not made shelf-stable at room temperature by the reduction alone, and the salt, pepper and cloves here are seasoning quantities that contribute nothing to safety.
- "Brushed over with a feather"The glaze was brushed onto cooked cold ham or tongue, so anything surviving in the jar was spread across a ready-to-eat surface that was never reheated. That is the second half of the risk, quite apart from the jar itself.
- Veloute and Spanish sauceBoth are mother sauces of the classic repertoire: veloute is a white roux moistened with veal or chicken stock, and "Spanish sauce" is the English name for sauce espagnole, the brown stock-based sauce. Neither is a shortcut you can buy, which is why these entries read as three lines rather than three pages.
- Shin and knuckleHalf a shin of beef is the lower foreleg, sold now as shin or osso-buco cuts; a knuckle of veal is the joint end of the leg. Both are chosen for connective tissue, which is what gives the finished glaze its gelatine and its set.
- "Brown meat jelly"In the game glaze this means a clarified aspic made from brown stock, stiff enough to set on its own. It is there to give the reduced sauce body and shine on cold birds.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf-Astoria for half a century, and his 1896 book records a kitchen working in the full late-nineteenth-century French manner, where a cold buffet was judged largely on its finish. Glazing cold ham, tongue, fowl and game with a mirror-bright coat of reduced sauce or aspic was the standard dress for such dishes, closely related to the chaud-froid work that Careme's generation had formalised and Escoffier's was codifying at the same moment on the other side of the Atlantic. The presence of partridge and woodcock is itself a period marker: American hotel menus of the 1890s still leaned heavily on wild game birds that market hunting supplied in quantity, before federal protection ended the trade. And the casual claim that a jar of meat glaze will keep ten or twelve months belongs to a world of cold cellars, constant kitchen use and a working understanding of spoilage that predates any grasp of what actually grows in a sealed jar of stock.