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Partridge, Croustades Of
Cut seven pieces of bread into cutlet shape, about three inches long and one and three-quarters thick. Cut also a round of bread of the same thickness and two and a half inches in diameter. Fry them in hot fat, and drain on a hot cloth. Cut out the middle part of each with the point of a knife, to the depth of about an inch. Fill the croustades with a salmi of partridge (see PARTRIDGE, SALMI OF), arrange the long pieces round a hot dish, put the round one on the top in the middle, and serve.
A serving vessel rather than a dish in itself: the recipe assumes you already have a salmi of partridge on the stove and simply tells you how to build the bread cases that hold it. Read the salmi entry first, since the croustades should be fried at the last moment.
- Start with the salmiThe whole preparation depends on a finished salmi of partridge — roasted or part-roasted birds jointed and finished in a rich brown sauce made from the carcasses. Make and hold that first; fried bread turns leathery if it sits.
- The bread mattersA close-crumbed loaf a day old is easiest to handle, cut 1¾ inches thick as the recipe directs. Fresh, open, airy bread drinks fat and collapses when hollowed. Trimming the crust helps the cases colour evenly, though the recipe does not say so.
- "Cutlet shape"An elongated oval tapering at one end, echoing the outline of a lamb cutlet. Cut a card template and work to it so all seven match.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat": hot enough to colour the bread quickly without letting it saturate, roughly 350–375F on a modern thermometer. They want to be a deep even gold, firm enough to hollow without tearing.
- "Drain on a hot cloth"A folded clean tea towel warmed in the oven. Kitchen paper on a warm plate does the same job; the point is that the croustades never cool, or condensation softens them.
- HollowingCut the cavity while the bread is still hot, scoring just inside the edge and lifting the plug out with the knife point. The recipe's depth of about an inch, taken from a 1¾-inch slice, leaves roughly ¾ inch of solid base beneath the filling.
- Yield and servingSeven cutlets and one round, eight croustades in all; the recipe gives no number of diners. Serve immediately once filled — croustades hold their crispness for a few minutes at most.
- If partridge is hard to findReared red-legged partridge is the bird most often available through game dealers in season. Any well-flavoured game or braised poultry in a brown sauce sits in these cases perfectly well.
Croustade is the French for a crust used as a container, and the technique — hollowing fried or baked bread to hold a ragoût — is older than the word's nineteenth-century vogue in English kitchens; it is often said to descend from the medieval trencher and the pastry "coffin". The entry sits among the partridge preparations, where the salmi was a familiar fate of game birds already once cooked: the classic French salmi reheats roasted birds in a sauce built from their own pounded carcasses, and a croustade turns that soft, saucy dish into something that can be plated architecturally. The insistence on seven matching cutlet shapes ringing a single central round is pure late-Victorian service, where a game entrée was expected to arrive as a built structure rather than a spoonful on a plate.