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Mayonnaise Turkey with Aspic Jelly
Cut the breast of a cooked turkey into slices, then cut them up again into shapes all alike. Make a quantity of mayonnaise sauce with lemon juice, and mix with it nearly its quantity of just melted aspic jelly. Coat the pieces of turkey with the mayonnaise jelly, place them on a dish, and stand the dish on the ice. Chop fine a boiled beet-root and some parsley. Take the slices of turkey on a fork, and when the jelly has firmly set, dip the upper side lightly into chopped parsley, and then into the beet-root. Arrange them on a dish, the parsley side upwards, against a pile of shred lettuces, garnish with small sprays of watercress and chopped aspic, and serve.
This is a classic mayonnaise collée — mayonnaise set with gelatin and used as an opaque coating, the cold-buffet cousin of chaud-froid. Everything depends on the temperature of the aspic when it meets the mayonnaise.
- The hinge: aspic temperature"Just melted" means barely liquid, around 90-100F, cool enough to hold against your wrist. Hotter aspic will thin the mayonnaise and can break the emulsion outright; colder aspic sets into lumps as you stir and the coating goes granular.
- Aspic jellyA clarified, well-gelled stock — turkey or chicken carcass simmered with aromatics, cleared with egg white, and set firm enough to slice. Powdered gelatin bloomed in strong reduced stock is a workable substitute, but use more than the packet directions suggest: it must set firm because the mayonnaise dilutes it by nearly half.
- Proportions"Nearly its quantity" is close to equal parts by volume, which is right for a coating that clings without running. Work in a bowl set over cool water, not ice, or it will stiffen in the bowl before it reaches the turkey.
- Raw eggMayonnaise here is never cooked and the dish is held cold for some time. Use pasteurized eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised.
- "Stand the dish on the ice"This meant an ice chest or a bed of crushed ice. The refrigerator does the same job; give each coated slice 20-30 minutes to set firm before dipping.
- Beet and parsleyBoth must be squeezed and blotted very dry, and chopped fine to a near-powder. Wet beet bleeds pink into the white coating and wet parsley slides off.
- Chopped aspicTurn a shallow tray of set aspic onto parchment and chop it with a cold knife into glittering dice. It is garnish only, and it weeps if it sits at room temperature.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; a single turkey breast trimmed into matching shapes will serve a handful of people as a cold luncheon course, depending on the bird. Assemble the same day and keep it refrigerated until the moment it goes to the table.
Coated cold meats of this kind were the backbone of the late-nineteenth-century buffet, where a dish was judged first by how it looked on the sideboard. Aspic and mayonnaise collée let a kitchen glaze sliced poultry into a smooth, pale, uniform surface that could then be decorated — here with green parsley and crimson beet. The technique was also a way of using the breast of an already-roasted bird. The garde-manger station that produced dishes like this one has largely vanished from restaurant kitchens, and with it the habit of eating turkey cold and dressed rather than hot and carved.