Aspic Jelly Decoration
From The housekeeper's guide to preserved meats, fruits, vegetables, &c, 1880
This dish is visually appealing and suitable for special occasions.
Presented as published in 1880. Historical recipes may not meet modern food-safety standards. Cook from the modern interpretation below, not the original instructions.
A modern interpretation · AI-generated from the original record
Ingredients
Method
As published
This recipe was extracted from The housekeeper's guide to preserved meats, fruits, vegetables, &c (1880), page 27. The excerpt below is the record exactly as published.
half a pint, of aspic jelly ; scrape out the jelly with anything — a marrow-spoon, for instance. Then with two silver forks mince it up into little pieces. Pile up a little heap on the fowl — on the breast— and place a few heaps round the base with some cut lemon and nice dark-coloured double parsley. What a difference this dish has in appearance compared to a fowl sent up just as it is ! Suppose, however, that time is no object, and you want to ornament, say, a couple of roast fowls, a tongue, and a piece of galantine. Take the bottle of aspic jelly and place it in warm water, just sufficiently long to enable you to pour out the jelly. Now take two flat plates, and pour the jelly out a quarter of an inch thick, or rather deep. See that the plate stands flat, or else one part of the jelly when it is cold will be thicker than another; Then take a bottle of cochineal, and drop a few drops into one plate, and stir it up till it is the colour you wish — a bright red. Let the jelly set, and you now have two round cakes of jelly a quar- ter of an inch thick, one a bright yellow and the other a bright red. These can be cut into any shape desired, and placed round the fowls and on the tongue and galantine. Alternate transparent bands of yellow and red look very nice placed over the white galantine. It would be impossible, without a coloured diagram, to describe the way in which dishes should be ornamented. It depends on the taste of the housekeeper herself, who should never entrust this branch to a Mai'y Ann of all work. They would 14 CROSSE AND never do it. As I have said before, the .best lesson is to look in at a shop win- dow like the one in * Princes Street. There is another set of delicious dishes — fish and meat in aspic jelly. Por this a mould is necessary. We will suppose we have got some cold boiled filleted sole, rolled up, ard which has been dipped in a mixture of oil, pepper, and Tarragon vinegar. First take a flat mould, and pour in about a wineglassful of aspic jelly. Let this get cold, then take the fillets of soles and arrange them so that they stand about an inch apart. Now pour in gently enough aspic to cover the fillets, and when the jelly is nearly set place carefully a little sprig j of bright green parsley between each ; white fillet. When the jelly is set — | which it will soon do if placed in chopped ice and salt — arrange another j layer of fillets, and proceed till the j mould is full. Keep it in the ice till it is set very firm. Have ready a dish, i Plunge the mould for a few seconds in , warm water. Wipe the mould quickly ! with a cloth, and turn it out. Surround the base with some lettuce leaves or the sliced hearts of little French lettuces, cut hard-boiled eggs, filleted anchovies, and four small red crayfish. You can ornament the mould still better if you have a few truffles. Cut a star of truffles, and place the star at the bottom of the mould after you have poured in the first wineglass, and surround the star with a few little sprigs, or rather leaves, of parsley. When the mould turns out, this black star at the top, surrounded by little bright green leaves in the bright aspic, looks very pretty. A star can be made also out of beetroot. This is not an expensive dish ; it only- wants a bottle of Crosse and Blackwell s aspic jelly
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Cook this with the app: pantry check, scaling, and the assistant.