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Boned Turkey with Jelly
Cut in quarter-inch pieces six tablespoons jelly. Arrange pieces on a cold dish. Cut six slices boned turkey a fifth of an inch thick, dress them, one overlapping another, over jelly. Decorate with six leaves of lettuce and serve.
This is a plating instruction more than a cooking one: a cold buffet arrangement of pre-cooked boned turkey with meat jelly. Everything depends on what the two components are and how cold they stay.
- "Jelly" means aspic"Jelly" most likely means aspic -- In a cold-larder recipe of this period, jelly of this kind is usually clarified savoury aspic made from veal or poultry stock rather than fruit preserve, though cut currant jelly was also served with cold poultry and the recipe does not specify. For the savoury reading, firm commercial aspic powder or a well-reduced homemade stock set with gelatine, chilled in a shallow pan and cut into dice, gives the same effect.
- "Boned turkey" is a made dish, not raw birdIt usually means a bird boned out, sometimes stuffed with forcemeat, rolled, poached or braised, pressed and chilled, in the manner of a galantine or ballotine; plain cold boned roast turkey would also answer. Either way it has to be cold and firmly set before it will cut in clean slices. Ready-made turkey roll or a well-chilled cooked breast is the practical substitute.
- The hinge is temperatureBoth the dish and the components must be genuinely cold. Aspic dice soften and weep within minutes on a room-temperature plate, and the whole arrangement slumps. Chill the serving dish in the refrigerator first, and assemble at the last moment.
- Measuring jelly by the tablespoonSix tablespoons is a little under half a cup, measured as set jelly before cutting into quarter-inch dice.
- Slice thicknessA fifth of an inch is about 5 mm, thin enough to drape but thick enough not to tear when lifted. A galantine slices best straight from the refrigerator with a long thin blade; a serrated knife will shred the forcemeat.
- "Dress them" The word means arrange, not sauce. The slices are shingled in an overlapping row so each shows a crescent of the one beneath, with the jelly visible at the edges.
- YieldSix slices and six lettuce leaves make a single platter, enough for two or three as a cold course; the recipe itself states no number of servings.
Cold boned poultry glazed or garnished with aspic belonged to the garde-manger, the cold-kitchen station of the professional brigade, where large birds were boned, stuffed, poached and pressed under weights to be sliced to order. Galantines of boned poultry are attested in French cookery well before the nineteenth century, and the practice persisted in American hotel and club kitchens into the early 1900s, where a boned bird had the practical advantage of carving into uniform slices with no waste and no carving at the table. The brevity of the entry suggests a reader who already had both the cold bird and a pan of jelly to hand, and needed only to be told how the plate should look.