The "Queen" cookery books: Entrees

When set, dish the fillets neatly in a circle alternately with sliced tongue, foie gras truffée, or plain truffles as you choose, filling up the centre with turned and farced olives, tiny cubes of foie gras, salad, &c., to taste, either with a plain or a mayonnaise salad dressing, and serve. If you prepare a supreme in this way and mount it on a border mould of cold chicken cream set in a mould lined with the chicken jelly, and fill up the centre with oysters bearded, and tossed in white mayonnaise and crisped celery, serving it as Supreme a V Americaine, you will score a distinct success. I do not recommend this as an economy, for, as I have observed before, a supreme can never, from its nature, be anything but an expensive dish (though properly managed as I have also previously shown, it need not be extravagant), but it is most certainly, if carefully made, a very seductive one. For the meat jelly put into a delicately clean pan loz. of leaf gelatine, a pint of well flavoured stock (white or brown, according to the use you intend putting it to), a sliced onion, a bay leaf, a bunch of herbs, a few peppercorns and allspice mixed, and the white and shell of an egg, and bring these all very gently to the boil, whisking them well together till the boil is just reached, then run it all through a wanned jelly bag. It should be crystal clear, but if not, strain it through the bag again. Now for the second version of this dish : Prepare the conventional white sauce of commerce, stiffen it with vigorously acidulated aspic jelly in the proportion of two parts aspic to one of white sauce, and with this mask thickly some slices cut from a cold fowl, either roast, boiled, or stewed, as may be convenient, and when this first coating is set, glaze with the plain aspic, and serve, in all probability with slices of tinned tongue and canned peas, or a tinned macedoine. Now, I do not for one moment assert that if carefully prepared this roughly described dish may not result in a distinctly appetising little entree on an emergency, and if the masking sauce is well flavoured, the aspic not unduly acid, and especially if the dish be modestly styled chicken in aspic, and tinned garnish be eschewed, it will meet with much approval, but a supreme en chaufroix , or en aspic, however nicely prepared, it simply is not, and never will be ! For an entree en aspic, the meat used may, or may not, have been cocked for the purpose. Of course, 1G0 it is daintier in the former case, but if nicely prepared, cold meat can be used up in this way most successfully. The great thing with all these cold dishes is great neatness and simplicity in the serving. All appearance of handling must be most scrupulously avoided A certain amount of garnish is, of course, almost de rigueur, but care must be taken not to overdo it. A safe rule for cold savourv entrees is to restrict the colourings religiously to such as may be naturally obtained. I do not say that they may not be judiciously helped out on occasions with a few drops of artificial colouring, but in this case impress on your cordon bleu . Hamlet’s advice to players, “ with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature . . . but hold, as ’twere, the mirror up