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Goose's Fat Liver in Aspic
Take the required number of fat livers and sprinkle over a little cayenne and salt and roll them into balls, mask them in bechamel sauce mixed in a little warmed aspic and decorate with slices of cooked black truffles cut in various ornamental designs. Put as many small moulds as there are balls of fat livers on ice, pour in a little warmed aspic jelly, let it set firm, put in the fat livers carefully so as not to disturb the decorations, fill up the moulds with more of the warmed aspic jelly, and let them set. Chop up fine a few lettuce leaves, mix them with oil and a slight sea soning of salt and pepper, put a layer of this on a dish, turn the contents of the moulds onto it, and serve with a garnish of shapes of colored aspic jelly put round the base of them. Cold Boiled Ham with Aspic Jelly Choose a freshly smoked ham, trim off the end of the knuckle-bone, and after having soaked it for a few hours, boil it for three and a half hours, then take the kettle off the fire and let the ham remain for three-quarters of an hour in its liquor. Then remove, drain it, cut the thigh-bone short, wrap it tightly in a cloth, and let it cool. When ready to serve, remove the cloth, peel off the rind, excepting at the knuckle-end, trim it neatly, glaze, fix a ruffle on the knuckle-bone, place a white paper on a dish, set the ham on it and garnish the base with chopped aspic jelly and truffles.
Two separate recipes have been run together in this page: the foie gras in aspic, and a cold boiled ham that begins at "Choose a freshly smoked ham." The first cannot be followed as printed.
- The liver is never cookedAs written, raw goose liver is seasoned, rolled, coated in sauce and sealed in cold jelly. Nothing in the procedure brings it above room temperature. Raw poultry liver is a common carrier of Campylobacter and Salmonella, and chilling in aspic does nothing to reduce that. It is possible the reader was expected to have cooked or tinned foie gras already to hand, but the printed text does not say so.
- Aspic held at room temperatureThe dish is assembled with warmed jelly, unmoulded onto dressed lettuce, and garnished for display. A meat jelly is an excellent growth medium once it warms. If you want foie gras in aspic, work from a current recipe with stated internal temperatures and holding times.
- "Mask in bechamel mixed with aspic"This is the classic chaud-froid coating: a white sauce loosened with melted jelly so it sets to an opaque, paintable shell. It is applied over a chilled item while the sauce is still just fluid and on the point of setting.
- Warmed aspic jellyThe aspic would have been a clarified meat or poultry stock cleared with egg white; "warmed" means just fluid, not hot. Poured hotter it melts the layer beneath and the truffle decoration shifts out of place, which is consistent with the instruction to "put in the fat livers carefully."
- Black truffles"Cooked black truffles" would most likely have meant tinned truffle, a routine hotel stores item at the time. In cut-out work of this kind the truffle is used at least as much for its colour as for its flavour.
- The ham, by contrast, is straightforwardA soaked smoked ham boiled three and a half hours, then rested three-quarters of an hour off the heat in its own liquor, is sound period practice for a bone-in ham; the rest in the liquor keeps the outer meat from drying. "Glaze" here most likely means brushing with meat glaze or reduced aspic for shine rather than a sugar glaze. The paper ruffle on the knuckle is banquet dressing.
Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to a large cookbook in 1896 that reads less like a domestic manual than a transcript of a professional cold larder, and this page shows why: two unrelated buffet pieces printed nose to tail, both existing chiefly to be looked at. Foie gras masked in chaud-froid and set in clear jelly belongs to the grande cuisine repertoire developed in France across the nineteenth century, where the cold table was the arena for a kitchen's decorative skill, and truffle cut into "ornamental designs" was the standard vocabulary of that work. Fattened goose liver itself is very old, generally traced to Egyptian and Roman force-feeding of geese, but its nineteenth-century association was with Strasbourg and the southwest of France, and American hotels imported it tinned. The recipe says nothing about cooking the liver, describing only the assembly.