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Macedoine in Aspic
(Normandy.) Make 1 quart of good aspic jelly, and while yet liquid, line a fancy mould with a part of it. Fill the centre with a pretty arrangement of equal parts of cooked and sliced sweetbreads, tongue, liver, mushrooms, truffles, and sausage. Serve cold, turned out on a dish, with mayonnaise dressing. The more meats used, the better.
BRAISED QUAILS. (Maison d'or, Paris.) Pick, clean, and split 6 quails. Roast them for 4 minutes, then put them in a casserole with 1 carrot, and 1 onion, sliced, 1 ounce of butter, parsley, thyme, a bayleaf, and 3 sliced green peppers, freed from seeds. Stir for 5 minutes, then add, over the fire, 1 pint of tomato sauce, 1/2 glass of sherry, and 3 tablespoonfuls of mushroom ketchup or sauce. Cover and cook for 10 minutes more in the oven, then serve in the casserole.
Two recipes run together here: a moulded aspic of mixed cooked meats, and braised quail from a Paris restaurant kitchen. Both assume a cook who already knows how to handle stock, offal and game birds.
- The aspic itself"Good aspic jelly" means a clarified, well-seasoned meat or poultry stock set with gelatine — about 1 quart, firm enough to unmould cleanly. A stock rich in feet and knuckles will set on its own; otherwise reckon on roughly 3 tablespoons of powdered gelatine per quart for a mould that will hold its shape at room temperature.
- Lining the mouldThe hinge of the dish. Pour in a thin layer, chill until tacky, then build up the sides by rolling the cold liquid around the mould over ice. Adding the meats before the lining has set will simply let them slump against the wall and show through.
- SweetbreadsThey must be soaked in several changes of cold water, blanched, pressed and trimmed of membrane before they are "cooked and sliced." The book takes that for granted. Untrimmed sweetbreads set in jelly are unpleasant.
- TrufflesTinned black truffles were a standard larder item in this kind of cooking, used as much for the dark colour against pale meats as for flavour. A few slices of a good black truffle, or simply more mushroom, will do; truffle oil will not, since it disappears in cold jelly.
- Serving the aspicDip the mould in hot water for a few seconds and turn out onto a chilled platter. A quart mould serves six to eight as a cold entree. Keep it refrigerated until the moment it goes to table — it is a dish of cooked meats held in stock and does not want an hour in a warm room.
- "Casserole" hereA lidded flameproof pot that goes from burner to oven, not a baking dish. The quails are roasted briefly first, then stirred with the vegetables over the fire in the casserole; the same pan is covered and moved to the oven, and it comes to the table as it is.
- Oven heat for the quailsNone is given. A hot oven, 400-425F, suits the short 10-minute finish. Quail breast is best served slightly pink; the legs should read around 165F. Ten minutes after a 4-minute roast and 5 minutes in the pan is enough for birds of ordinary size.
- Half a glass of sherryThe recipe says only "glass"; if a wine glass is meant, that is reckoned at roughly 2 fl oz in period recipes, making half a glass about 2 tablespoons. Use a dry amontillado or fino rather than a sweetened cooking sherry.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquid, nothing like tomato ketchup. Bottled versions are still sold; a mixture of soy sauce and a little Worcestershire approximates the salt-and-umami effect if none is at hand.
- YieldSix split quails serve three generously or six as a course among others.
Macédoine is the old French kitchen word for a mixture of diced things — vegetables, fruit, or as here, meats — and the name is often said to derive from the mixed peoples of Alexander's Macedonian empire, though that derivation is likely folk etymology. Setting such a mixture in aspic was the standard nineteenth-century way to present cold meats handsomely on a buffet, and the recipe calls for cooked meats, with the instruction that "the more meats used, the better" — sweetbread, tongue and sausage among them. The second recipe carries the name of the Maison Dorée on the Boulevard des Italiens, one of the grand Paris restaurants of the Second Empire and after, and the attributions are the whole point of this book — a collection gathered abroad and labelled by region and by house, so that an American cook could put a Normandy mould and a Paris quail on the same page.