Chicken Cream with Tomato
Another way would be to line the moulds with liquid aspic and a little tomato sauce. When this sets fill with the chicken cream as before. If you like the cream may be omitted from the chicken and when it is unmoulded it may be covered with a French dressing or with mayonnaise.
Any remains of cold meat can be chopped finely, mixed with shredded lettuce or watercress or parsley, capers, stoned olives, a truffle or two and mayonnaise, with enough liquid aspic to stiffen it and moulded in any way.
These do make delicious presentations of old subjects—just a little labor and a little inventive painstaking and you have accomplished wonders. There are so many garnishes that may be used with these cold things to make them more of a delight that it is impossible to go through the list. Sliced tomatoes or cucumbers or some cold cooked vegetable with a French dressing—any quantity of them you see once you begin to cast about for them.
No one knows better than I do that to make the conventional aspic jelly is a labor that involves terrible risks as regards the breaking of the commandment concerning profanity. I don’t mind telling you that I found it was having such a degenerating effect on my whole moral nature that I hit upon using just the best gelatine I can buy—this is not the place to name it, however—and dissolving it in a clear stock—white or brown as the case demands. Try it in making these aspic things.
Cold Cutlets in Jelly
You know, of course, that cold cutlets are the most impossible left-over thing with which the housekeeper has to deal. But prepare some savory jelly with stock and tomato sauce and coat these left-over cutlets with it some day and have them for luncheon. You will confess that you have learned something worth knowing.
Then there are numberless kinds of fish, almost any kind in fact that doesn’t run to bone, that will flake well; dip the pieces in a jelly of this kind diluted with any kind of sauce—Hollandaise, vinaigrette, tomato, and so on to the end of the list. Now, mind, when I say coat these viands with this jelly I don’t mean for you to give them a regular ulster for a coat—but a little thin diaphanous jacket, suitable for hot weather, you understand.
When you can use cream in the jellies, either whipped or straight, the daintiness of them is increased by just so much.
There are some kinds of game—dark game especially—that you may slice and coat with this jelly using currant jelly with it also and get some combinations that will drive your friends to despair.