Imperative cooking: turning to jelly
I AM staring at a wonderfully ghastly pic- ture titled `Chaudfroid de Volaille'. It is in the vast Ideal Cookery Book published just after the first world war, but with its recipes at pre-war prices. There's a pale yellow lump on a dish, faintly glistening. Cascad- ing down the sides are rivulets of hideous gold aspic which form a sort of moat round the bottom. In between the rivulets are mauve stars with cherry-red spots in their centres, and floating in the moat are sick- green imitation lettuce leaves and parsley flowerets.
There's an even more lurid picture some pages further on, `Chaudfroid de Volaille en Belle Vue', in which the glistening bird has an imitation mauve and green sage branch bearing bizarre black fruits stuck on its side. Ideal notes that it takes two hours, feeds six to eight and costs five shillings and sixpence. A later `Chaudfroid de Cailles' illustration cannot be described in a family magazine.
It is a long time since any dinner I have been to in a private house has offered me a chaudfroid or, for that matter, a mayon- naise collee, or even a simple aspic. I'm not too worried about the absence of chaud- froid, though it would do a lot of modern young women, to say nothing of modern young men, a lot of good to spend a few evenings clarifying aspics and making mauve and green imitation branches or yel- low cascades. But aspic or jelly is another matter. Jellies were not a dish but a whole method of cooking. In losing them we have lost not one dish but an important way of preparing main courses and, even more, first courses and fish.
I too had almost forgotten them. Apart from jellied eels and their rather good imitation, jellied garfish and, of course, cold jellied consommés, there's been next to no jelly in this house for some years. Jelly was dumped, I suspect, in the Sixties with the rest of that Edwardian cuisine so typified by the Ideal Cookery Book. There are many horrible things in Edwardian cooking but there are exceptions. Here's an exercise for Imperative cooks. Find a few hours this winter and sit down with the Ideal or its many 1,000-page equiva- lents and a pair of dark glasses. Do a spot of revisionism. You will be surprised at the number of dishes and, more impor- tant, techniques and processes that are worth salvaging. I started staring at 'Belle Vue' and the others because I'd been staring into my fridge and suddenly noticed a scabbard fish. It had been bought two days previ- ously in an outing to Billingsgate. I thought I'd dealt with all the swag from that raid, gurnards, oysters, gilthead bream, dark crab meat, a huge salmon, a pile of saupes, but I'd forgotten the scab- bard fish. Even its splendid silver sheen can be hidden behind the other fish already prepared in the fridge. So it had to be incorporated in the evening's dinner and in a series of cold fish courses which had already been done. What to do? Why not jelly? That would deal with the bones too, which some of the guests might find tricky. It's awful to watch them spitting them out in a would-be polite way, start- ing with a toothless old boy's chewing action and ending with a discreet dribble into a raised fist.
It took a few minutes to poach lengths of the fish in wine, water, bay leaf and the rest, then fillet them, throw the bones back into the stock, cook them some more, filter off the stock add gelatine and pour over the fish. (Yes, you may clarify, if you wish, with egg whites. I chose to add puréed sorrel and parsley, which meant I didn't have to.) Aspic can be done with most fish, so, those who are new to jelly, you have just learned 40-odd dishes. It is good too with mixed leftover fish and shellfish. Birds are fine in jelly, especially chickens with added tar- ragon, quail and partridge. And so is beef, braised first in red wine.
Once you have mastered the easy aspics there is the mayonnaise collee. This is just mayonnaise with gelatine dissolved in water and whipped in. I should not tell you this but it can be piped through a pas- try tube so you can make baroque mud pies. If you insist, go on to the chaud- froids which are essentially meat stocks with cream and aspic. Both these latter can be applied in multiple coatings and the sauce divided up and coloured with different colourings. The best book here is probably Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Do not on any account try for the Belle Vue on the first occasion, if ever. Be content with a sort of striped Artex. Or you can bypass the chaudfroids and go on to jelly shapes, layered jellies and jellies in bunny moulds. I will stay with the fish or meat in unclarified jelly.
Previous page
