Crawfish Salad with Jelly

Detach the tails from the bodies of several dozen cooked crawfish; suppress the shells from the tails and largest legs; pare the meats, season, and keep them covered. Prepare a macedoine salad (No. 2650), cut into small dice, add to it the legs and parings of shrimps, also cut in dice; season with salt, oil and vinegar, and let marinate for one hour. Select a plain border mold with a narrow cylinder, imbed it in broken ice, and decorate its sides with eggs cut in two, alternated with some small vegetable balls dipped in half-set jelly; fill up the empty space in the mold gradually with some partly cold jelly (No. 103). Drain the salad on a sieve, lay it back into the bowl and mix in with it a jellied mayonnaise (No. 613); stir it on ice for a few minutes. Unmold the border on a cold dish; place into the cylindrical space a wooden foundation of exactly the same diameter, having on the center a light upright support, both being covered with white paper; lay the salad around this support, giving it a pyramidical shape, smooth the surfaces, and cover it with a thin layer of thick jellied mayonnaise (No. 613); keep for two minutes on ice. Stick in the crawfish tails one by one, using a larding needle for the purpose, first dipping them in half-set jelly, then fasten them to the salad in three graduated rows, each one laying in a different direction, and forming a pyramid. As soon as each row is finished coat it over with some half-set jelly to consolidate it; in the hollow of the third or top row lay a pretty lettuce heart, and serve a sauce-boat of mayonnaise sauce (No. 606) at the same time as the salad.