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KID (a la Poulette)
Soak a young kid in milk and water for four hours. Drain it, bind strips of fat bacon round it, and roast before a clear fire for three-quarters of an hour. Take it down, and cut from it a neat piece, weighing about two pounds, leaving the rest to hash, or cook at some other time. Put the piece cut off into a saucepan, with a pint of veal stock, a tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, half a tea-spoonful of powdered mace, a dozen button-mushrooms, a bunch of parsley, and a piece of butter, the size of an egg, rolled in flour. Let it stew gently for an hour; then take out the meat, place it on a hot dish, strain the sauce, let it boil up once more, then draw it to the side of the fire to cool for two minutes, and add gradually the well-beaten yolk of an egg, mixed with a table-spoonful of thick cream. The sauce must not boil after the egg is added, or it will curdle. Pour the sauce over the kid, and serve as hot as possible. Garnish the dish with parsley and cut lemon. Probable cost, uncertain, kids being seldom offered for sale. Sufficient for four persons.
A two-stage treatment: the kid is part-roasted whole, then a prime cut is finished in a stock that becomes a poulette sauce. Everything hinges on the last step.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the egg yolk and cream go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer — around 180F is the safe ceiling. Bring it back to the boil and the yolk scrambles into threads. The instruction to draw it aside for two minutes first is doing real work; take the pan off the heat entirely and temper a ladle of hot sauce into the yolk before returning it.
- "A la poulette"Not a chicken dish. Poulette is the classic velvety white sauce of stock thickened with butter and flour, finished with egg yolk, cream and usually lemon — the same sauce served over tripe, mussels and sweetbreads. The cut lemon in the garnish is there to be squeezed.
- Sourcing the meat"Kids being seldom offered for sale" is no longer quite true — halal, Caribbean and Mexican butchers sell goat routinely. Rather than a whole carcass, buy a 2 to 2 1/2 lb boneless shoulder or a leg; shoulder suits the hour of stewing better than loin.
- Roasting before the fireThree-quarters of an hour before a clear fire would only part-cook a whole small animal, browning it rather than roasting it through. A hot oven will give comparable browning on a single joint before it goes into the stock.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, rolled in flour — roughly 2 oz butter to 1 oz flour, which is the thickening for a pint of stock. Working it in as beurre manié rather than a cooked roux is why the sauce stays pale.
- The milk-and-water soakFour hours of soaking whitens the flesh and pulls out some of the strong-smelling blood — the same logic as soaking brains or sweetbreads. Worth doing with goat, which has more character than the recipe's white sauce expects.
- Mushrooms and stock"Button-mushrooms" here means small whole white mushrooms, added raw; they will give up liquid over the hour. Veal stock is the correct base because it is neutral and gelatinous — a light chicken stock is the nearest supermarket substitute, but avoid anything dark or heavily reduced.
- Doneness and yieldRoast plus an hour of gentle stewing brings shoulder to the point of carving cleanly rather than falling apart. Serves four, as stated, with the remainder of the carcass explicitly earmarked for hashing another day.
Cassell's puts this among the kid recipes with an honest admission that the meat was hard to buy in late-Victorian Britain — goat was kept for milk. The sauce, though, is thoroughly French and thoroughly fashionable: a la poulette was one of the standard white liaison sauces of the nineteenth-century repertoire, and here an unfamiliar meat is dressed exactly as one would dress veal. The instruction to roast a whole animal and then cut a neat two-pound piece from it, hashing the rest later, reflects a kitchen that bought carcasses rather than joints and planned several days of meals from one purchase.