No. 2419

Aspic of Quails—Breasts

Aspic de Filets de Cailles

Raise the breasts and minion fillets from three or four quails, pare and beat lightly, season and poach in butter and lemon juice, keeping them rare; cool them off under the pressure of a light weight between two buttered papers. Detach the minion fillets from the carcass and streak them with truffles; poach them also in butter and lemon juice, bending them slightly. Divide each large fillet into two pieces, pare them neatly and dip them one by one in a brown chaudfroid sauce (No. 594); range them as fast as they are done on a baking sheet to harden the sauce, then pare. Cut some croutons of very tender red beef tongue, having them the shape of the fillets, only half as many, and trim them nicely. Imbed a fancy cylindrical mold (Fig. 148) in ice; on the bottom lay a thin bed of jelly and on this dress the minion fillets, pressing them down on the sides that are streaked; cover them gradually with cold jelly to have it form a thickness of about an inch, then let it set; dress the fillets in a circle on this, laying them on their smoothest side and alternating every two with a crouton of red beef tongue; cover this circle with another layer of the jelly half an inch thick and form more circles with the fillets, proceeding as for the others. Fill the mold with cold jelly, put the mold aside on ice for an hour, and just when ready to serve invert the aspic on a bed of jelly hardened on a dish and surround it with small paper cases filled with small truffles covered with a brown chaudfroid sauce (No. 594).

← No. 2418 Aspic of Pullet a la Cussy The Cold Service No. 2420 Aspic of Tongue a la Picquart →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a display piece from the cold buffet, and the problem with it is not the mold work but the bird. The points below explain the hazard and unpick the vocabulary; they are not a method for reproducing it.

Rare poultry, then served coldThe breasts are poached only until rare and are never reheated — they go straight into jelly and onto the table. Quail carries the same Salmonella and Campylobacter risk as other poultry, and nothing in this preparation brings the meat to a temperature that would deal with it.
Hours in the danger zoneBetween poaching, pressing under weights, dipping in chaudfroid, layering, an hour on ice and then a long stand on the buffet, undercooked meat spends a great deal of time in the range where bacteria multiply. Ranhofer's kitchen ran on ice cellars and constant service; a modern reader replicating the sequence at home is compounding the first risk with a second.
Aspic and chaudfroid are growth mediaA gelatin-rich stock cooled slowly and handled repeatedly is close to laboratory broth. Both sauce No. 594 and the jelly here are built from reduced stock, cooled, and worked by hand at ambient temperature, and the finished aspic insulates whatever is inside it. If you want a cold quail dish, work from a current recipe with stated temperatures.
"Minion fillets"Ranhofer's filets mignons of a bird are the two small tenders lying against the breastbone, not the beef cut. On a quail each is very small; here they are the ones streaked with truffle and laid on the bottom of the mold, streaked side down, so the pattern shows when it is turned out.
"Croutons" of tongueIn this book a crouton is any shaped slice cut to a pattern, not fried bread. Here they are trimmed pieces of cooked red beef tongue, used purely for the colour contrast against the brown chaudfroid.
Streaking with trufflesStreaking means inlaying thin strips of black truffle into shallow cuts in the flesh, so the pattern shows through the jelly when the mold is turned out. The purpose here is chiefly decorative.
The mold in iceEmbedding the mold in ice is the period's substitute for a refrigerator, and it is what makes the layered construction possible — the recipe calls for a bed of jelly about an inch thick and then half-inch layers between tiers, each of which must set hard before the next row of fillets is laid on, or the pattern collapses.
ScaleThree or four quails yield six or eight large breast fillets, each divided in two for twelve to sixteen pieces, plus the tenders for the bottom layer, with tongue croutons at half the number of fillets. That fills one cylindrical mold, presented on the buffet as a dish for a table rather than a portion apiece.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this is a page from the part of the trade that has largely disappeared: the cold service, where the point of a dish was as much its appearance on the buffet as its taste. Aspic work of this kind — meat set in clear jelly in geometric tiers, glazed in chaudfroid, garnished with truffle and tongue for black-and-crimson contrast — descends from the grande cuisine of Carême and was still, in Ranhofer's day, the accepted way to show off a kitchen's discipline at a ball supper or a summer banquet. Quail suited it: small, uniform, and expensive enough to signal the bill. Chaud-froid, literally "hot-cold," is a sauce made hot and served cold, thickened with enough gelatin to coat and hold; the name is generally traced to eighteenth-century French usage, with several competing origin stories and no documentation for any of them. The numbered cross-references throughout — sauce No. 594, mold Fig. 148 — are a reminder that the book was written for professionals working through a system, not for readers cooking one dish at a time.