No. 2443

Vegetable Borders

Bordures de Legumes

Boil and cook in salted water some carrots, turnips, green peas and whole string beans; keep them all slightly firm. Cut the carrots into three-sixteenths of an inch to a quarter of an inch thick slices, according to the size of the border; lay these slices on a napkin to dry, then cut half-rings from them with a column tube and coat them with half-set jelly. Fasten them on by dipping into half-set jelly, and then placing them tastefully on the edge of the basin of a very cold dish; range the string beans in lozenge form between the half-rings at the base and the green peas on the center of the half-rings on top.

← No. 2442 Borders of Different Shaped Jelly Croutons The Cold Service No. 2444 Butter Borders →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a garnish rather than a dish: a decorative band of glazed vegetables fixed around the rim of a cold platter. Ranhofer assumes you already have aspic on hand and a cold-larder's worth of patience.

Half-set jellyThis is aspic (clarified meat or poultry stock set with gelatin) chilled until it is syrupy and just beginning to hold — the stage where it coats but has not gelled solid. Keep the bowl over ice water and stir occasionally; if it sets hard, warm it gently and bring it back down.
Column tubeA column cutter is a small plain round tube, essentially a metal cylinder of the sort used for aspic cutting. The recipe gives no diameter, tying the scale instead to the size of the border; the half-ring would be cut from the carrot slice with such a tube and then divided.
Cut thicknessThree-sixteenths to a quarter inch is roughly 5 to 6 mm — thick enough that the slices stand up to handling and do not curl as they dry.
Cook them firmThe hinge of the whole thing. Carrots and turnips must be just tender so they slice cleanly without crumbling; peas and beans should be blanched briefly and shocked in ice water so they stay bright green. Any softer and the pieces will slump off the rim.
Dry the slicesThe napkin is not fussiness. Surface water dilutes the aspic and stops it from gripping, so the vegetables must be blotted genuinely dry before glazing.
A very cold dishThe platter should be chilled hard, ideally in the refrigerator or on ice, so that each piece sets the moment it touches down. Working on a room-temperature dish means the jelly slides.
Lozenge formLozenges are diamonds. The string beans are laid at angles to make a diamond lattice along the base, with the pea sitting as a dot on the crown of each half-ring.
Holding and servingAspic-set garnishes are a refrigerator preparation. Assemble no more than a few hours ahead, keep the finished platter cold until it goes to the table, and do not let it stand out through a long buffet.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer worked as chef at Delmonico's in New York across two separate spells, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the house's working manual, written in the codified French grande cuisine of the period. Borders like this one belong to the cold service — the buffet of galantines, chaud-froids and moulded salads that was the showpiece of a nineteenth-century supper — where the visual architecture of a dish counted for as much as its flavor. The technique of fixing cut vegetables to a platter with tacky aspic is the same one behind chaud-froid decoration and the elaborate socles of the era, and it survived in professional garde-manger training well into the twentieth century. That Ranhofer devotes a run of consecutive entries to borders of jelly croutons, vegetables and butter shows how routine this kind of edging was.