Home › Old and New Palace › Old and New Palace: Julienne
Old and New Palace: Julienne
Arrange them in an earthenware dish. Cut in Julienne one stalk of celery, one green pepper, one cucumber, two or three tomatoes, depending on their size. With the bone of the sand-dab, well cleaned, make a stock with one bottle of Riesling, juice of one lemon and seasoning. Add chervil and tarragon. Season to taste and cook the Julienne ingredients with some of the stock. When the rest of the stock is boiling poach it in the fillets of sand-dab, then remove from the fire and let get cold. Put the garnishing around the fillets and put on ice to get in jelly. When ready to serve decorate around the dish with any kind of salad you like, and with beets, capers, olives and marinated mushrooms. This must be served very cold and you may serve mayonnaise sauce on the side.
We asked Dauviller what he considered his most delicate salad and he gave us this recipe:
PALACE GRILL SALAD Select three hearts of celery and cut them Julienne. Cut some pineapple and pimentoes into dice. Mix all well together in a bowl and add mayonnaise sauce and a little whipped cream. Sprinkle some finely chopped green peppers on top and serve very cold.
Two dishes run together here: a cold sand-dab in aspic and, tacked on at the end, chef Dauviller's celery and pineapple salad. The text begins mid-sentence because the filleting of the sand-dabs was described on the preceding page.
- The missing first step"Arrange them" means the raw sand-dab fillets, skinned and boned, laid flat in the earthenware dish. The bones are reserved for the stock, which is presumably why the recipe asks for them well cleaned.
- Sand-dabsPacific sanddab is a small left-eyed flatfish, cheap and abundant in San Francisco markets then; a whole fish yields four thin fillets, each an ounce or so. Petrale sole, English sole, flounder or fluke behave the same way. Avoid anything thick or firm-fleshed, which is wrong for a dish built on thin fillets set in jelly.
- A bottle of RieslingRead it as a standard bottle, roughly 750 ml. Whether Californian or imported is not stated; use a dry white, since a sweet one will make the aspic cloying.
- JulienneMatchsticks roughly 2 inches long and 1/8 inch square. Seed and peel the cucumber, and peel and seed the tomatoes before cutting, or the jelly will weep.
- The poaching is the hingeThin flatfish fillets need 2 to 3 minutes in barely shivering stock, not a rolling boil. Bring the stock to a boil, slide in the fillets, pull the pan off the heat immediately and let them finish in the residual heat, or they will shred and cloud the jelly.
- Getting it to jellFish bones alone rarely give enough gelatin to set 750 ml of liquid reliably. Reduce the strained stock hard first, and expect to bloom and add about 1 tablespoon of powdered gelatin per 2 cups of finished stock. Clarify with an egg-white raft if you want the transparency the dish is built on.
- "Put on ice"A refrigerator. Four to six hours will set it; overnight is better. Serve within two days and keep it below 40F throughout, since the dish is eaten cold from start to finish.
- The mayonnaiseBoth the aspic garnish and the Grill Salad call for mayonnaise, made in 1914 with raw yolks. Use commercial mayonnaise or pasteurised eggs if you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised.
- The Grill Salad proportionsThree celery hearts, julienned, with pineapple and pimento cut small; bind with roughly 1/2 cup mayonnaise lightened with 1/4 cup whipped cream. Fresh pineapple is sharper here than canned. Enough for four to six as a first course.
Clarence Edwords published Bohemian San Francisco in 1914, gathering recipes from the chefs of the city's restaurants partly as a record of a food culture the 1906 earthquake and fire had scattered. The Palace Hotel was its grandest name: the original burned in 1906 and the "new" Palace opened in 1909, which is why the chapter sets old against new. Dishes like this one, poached fish set in a clear wine jelly and framed with cut vegetables, belong to the high French garde-manger tradition that American luxury hotels imported wholesale, where the cold buffet was a display of knife work as much as of cooking. The sand-dab itself is the local note: a small Pacific flatfish, cheap and abundant in San Francisco markets then, treated here with the ceremony a Parisian kitchen would have given sole.