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Galantine with Jelly
Take up four tablespoons jelly from the jar, cut it into quarter-inch-square pieces and arrange jelly on a dish. Take the galantine and cut twelve thin, equal slices. Arrange them, one overlapping another, on the dish over the jelly, decorate with six cleaned lettuce leaves and serve.
This is the finishing stage of a larger preparation: the galantine and its jelly are made elsewhere in the book, and this entry is purely about getting them onto a dish. A few terms need translating before the plate makes sense.
- "Jelly" here means aspicNot fruit preserve but a savoury, gelatine-rich jelly, most likely clarified stock, set firm in a jar or bowl. Chopped aspic was a common garnish for cold meats; the equivalent today is a savoury aspic set from good stock, or a commercial aspic powder made up to strength.
- What a galantine isA boned bird or joint — chicken, veal, turkey — stuffed with forcemeat, rolled tight in a cloth, poached in stock and pressed under weight until cold. It is served cold and sliced, never reheated.
- Chop the aspic cold and quicklyTurn the set jelly out onto a cold board and cut into quarter-inch dice with a knife dipped in hot water between strokes. Warm hands and a warm room make it smear; work fast and return it to the refrigerator if it starts to soften.
- Slice the galantine straight from the coldIt cuts cleanly only when thoroughly chilled, having been pressed until cold. Use a long thin-bladed knife and cut across the roll so each slice shows the pattern of the forcemeat.
- Four tablespoons is a garnish, not a bedFour tablespoons -- roughly a quarter-cup in modern terms. The recipe arranges the chopped jelly on the dish and lays the slices over it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no serving count; it specifies twelve thin slices and six lettuce leaves.
- Keep it cold on the tableAspic and cold poached meat both suffer at room temperature — the jelly weeps and the surface dries. Assemble at the last moment, and chill the serving dish beforehand.
Galantine is one of the set pieces of nineteenth-century garde-manger cooking, the cold larder work that a professional kitchen judged its apprentices by: boning a bird whole, rebuilding it around a forcemeat, poaching it in its own stock and pressing it flat so it slices to a pattern. The name is generally traced to Old French words for gelatine or jelly, and the jelly is the point u2014 the same stock that cooks the roll is clarified and set to glaze and garnish it. The presentation, as here, is a matter of its own: overlapping slices, chopped aspic sparkling around the rim, a few leaves of lettuce for colour and nothing more. Cold pressed meats also suited a kitchen without much refrigeration in the sense we know it: made a day ahead, weighted and kept in the coolest place in the house, a galantine fed a table without any last-minute cooking at all.