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Garnish, Cockscombs For
Put the combs into a saucepan with plenty of cold water. Place them on the fire and stir constantly until the skin begins to rise. Take them off immediately, remove the skin, and throw the combs into salt and water. Change the water two or three times, and let them remain until quite white. Dry, and boil them in some good stock, flavoured with lemon-juice. Time, eight hours to prepare.
This is a preparation, not a finished dish: cockscombs cleaned and blanched white so they can be simmered in stock and dropped into a garnish. Almost every difficulty lies in the first two minutes.
- The hinge: catch the skin as it liftsThe combs go into cold water and are brought up slowly while stirred; the recipe's only cue is the skin beginning to rise, which comes before a simmer rather than at any stated temperature. Take them off the heat the moment it slips, as the recipe insists ("take them off immediately"); a hard boil is generally held to set the skin to the flesh so that it will not rub off cleanly.
- "Salt and water"An unmeasured light brine; the recipe gives no proportion at all. Its purpose is presumably to draw out blood so the combs blanch ivory rather than grey, which is why the water is changed two or three times.
- Soak coldThe eight hours is given as time "to prepare", and appears to be mostly soaking rather than cooking. Do the long soak in the refrigerator, since raw poultry parts sitting at room temperature all day is the one part of the method to discard.
- "Good stock"The book specifies nothing beyond "good"; a rich, unsalted white chicken or veal stock suits. Salted commercial broth will concentrate as it reduces around the combs and overwhelm them; the lemon juice is presumably for flavour and may also help keep the combs pale.
- How long they actually simmerCassell's gives no cooking time, only preparation time. Cockscombs are largely collagen and need a gentle simmer, commonly an hour to two, until a knife point goes through with no resistance. Never let them gallop or they shrink and toughen.
- SourcingSupermarkets essentially never carry them. Ask a whole-bird poultry butcher, or look in halal and East and Southeast Asian markets, where heads and combs are sometimes sold with the carcass. Frozen combs are said to reach the restaurant trade.
- Yield and useThe recipe gives no quantities or yield. Combs served as a garnish rather than as a dish in themselves: they crown vol-au-vents, ragoûts and sauced poultry, usually alongside cocks' kidneys, quenelles, truffle and button mushrooms.
Cockscombs belong to the elaborate French garnitures that English cookery books of the later nineteenth century took over — the financière and Toulouse style mixtures of quenelles, truffles, mushrooms, cocks' kidneys and combs that were spooned over a vol-au-vent or a fricassée. They had been used far longer than that; combs appear in medieval and Renaissance European cookery, valued for a gelatinous texture rather than for any strong flavour of their own. Their presence in a general household dictionary like Cassell's suggests something about the period's ambitions: a middle-class kitchen was expected to at least recognise the trimmings of grande cuisine, and in a household with servants the eight hours of soaking and skinning would not have fallen to the mistress. The same thrift that made combs worth saving from a bird also kept calves' feet, palates and cocks' kidneys in use, all of which had largely disappeared from English tables within a couple of generations.