FoodNetArchive

Cassell's dictionary of cookery

1892

Page 76 · 2 recipe records on this page

Presented as published in 1892. Historical recipes may not meet modern food-safety standards. Cook from the modern interpretation, not the original instructions.
One very pretty garnish for cold dishes is aspic jelly. Make some good aspic jelly according to the recipe given on page 36, and pour it when liquid into a large dish. Reserve a little of the jelly, and add to it a few drops of cochinealAspic Jelly, wMch mil make the jelly a bright red ; pour tliis also into a similar-shaped dish, and allow the jelly to get cold. You can now cut tliis jelly into any shape you may wish — a diamond pattern is as good as any — as the jelly will settle on the dish, which should have been filled aboiit a quarter of an inch deep. You will conse- quently have alternate pieces of a bright pale yellow and bright red to place round any dish you may wish, such as cold chicken cutlets. Again, the trimmings of the jelly can be beaten up with two forks, and be piled up as a sort of glittering heap in the middle of any, dish. Of course the simplest and most useful of all garnishes is plain green parsley, and you can generally tell by simply watching how a cook will send to table a common dish, like a cold roast fowl, whether she is possessed of any taste or not. A cold roast turkey glazed and sent to table tastefully decorated with parsley is always a handsome dish. One very common form of handsome dishes is cold turkey or chicken, boned, (fee, dressed with forcemeat, but modelled the shape, say, of a boar's head or a swan. These dishes are made by means of copper moulds, tinned iiiside, and which ai'e rather expensive to buy. The meat is placed in the mould warm, and mixed with a strong stock, which being a jelly when cold causes all the meat to adhere together; some liquid strong stock can also be poured in after the mould has been shut together. On turning out, of course, the shape is perfect, so far as the mould itself is ; it may occasionally, however, require a little trimming. This moulded dish now requu-es glazing. Suppose, for instance, it is a boar's head. Get some very strong dark but bright glaze ; keep the glaze in a little basin, dissolved, placed in a larger basin into which some boiling water has been poured. In fact, heat the glaze just like what it so much resembles — ^glue. By means of two artificial eyes, and PRINCIPLES SWEETS OMELETS. Ixiii the kernels of two brazil nuts stuck in for tusks, the resemblance becomes very- perfect. Should the model be a swan, a real swan's head is generally placed on the top, and joined to the mould by means of a wire. If the mould be a pheasant, the head of the pheasant can be affixed, and wings with the feathers on placed each side, while the long tail-fea,thers are stuck in to represent the tail. SWEETS. Omelet