A guide to modern cookery

table, separately, a fine Béchamel sauce, combined with the braising-liquor of the trout, strained and reduced, and finished with crayfish butter. 813—TRUITES SAUMONÉES FROIDES We are now concerned with a whole series of unpublished “Trout” preparations, which are at once of superfine delicacy and agreeable aspect, and which admit of clean and easy dishing. Cook a trout weighing from two to three lbs. in _court-bouillon_, and let it cool in the latter. Then drain it; sever the head and tail from the body, and put them aside. Completely skin the whole fish, and carefully separate the two fillets from the bones. Deck each fillet with tarragon and chervil leaves, lobster coral, poached white of eggs, &c., and set them, back to back, upon a _mousse_ of tomatoes lying in a special, long white or coloured porcelain dish about one and one-half to two inches deep. Replace the head and tail, and cover the whole with a coating of half-melted, succulent fish aspic, somewhat clear. Let the aspic set, and incrust the dish containing the trout in a block of ice, or surround it with the latter broken. 814—PREPARATION DE LA MOUSSE DE TOMATES This _mousse_, like those which I shall give later, is really a _bavarois_ without sugar. Its recipe is exactly the same as that of the “_bavarois_ of fruit,” except with regard to the question of sugar. Cook one-half lb. of tomato pulp (cleared of skin and seeds, and roughly chopped) in one oz. of butter. When the pulp has thoroughly mingled with the butter, add thereto two tablespoonfuls of velouté thickened by means of eight leaves of gelatine per quart of the sauce. Rub through tammy, and add to the preparation, when almost cold, half of its volume of barely-whipped cream. Taste the _mousse_; season with a few drops of lemon juice, and if it still seems flat, add the necessary salt and a very little cayenne. N.B.—It will be seen that I prescribe cream only half-whipped. This precaution, however, does not apply to “Mousse de Tomates” alone, but to all _mousses_. Well-whipped cream imparts a dry