Home › The Principles of Cookery › Partridge, Souffle Of
Partridge, Souffle Of
Take the remains of cold partridge, two eggs, one onion, six cloves, one ounce of butter, one ounce of flour, pepper, salt, nutmeg, one pint of stock or water. Remove the meat, and put the bones into a saucepan, also an onion stuck with cloves, and a pint of stock or water. Let them simmer for an hour and a half, or till the stock has reduced about one-half. Mince the meat and pound it in a mortar, sprinkle a little pepper and salt and a dust of nutmeg. When the stock is ready, melt the butter, add the flour, and let it brown; then pour in the stock very gradually, stirring all the time, let it boil up, and pour enough over the meat to make it the consistency of ordinary mince, add the yolks of two eggs; beat the whites to a stiff froth, and add them at the last moment. Put the mixture into a souffle dish or ramakin cups, and bake in a very hot oven for about ten minutes.
A way of stretching the last of a roast game bird into a hot savoury course. It behaves less like a modern soufflé than like a light meat pudding raised with egg white, and it wants to be served the moment it leaves the oven.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe whites go in "at the last moment" and must be cut through the warm meat mixture with a spatula in as few strokes as possible. Beaten into it, the air is gone and you get a dense baked mince.
- "A very hot oven"Read this as roughly 425-450F (220-230C), fully preheated. The recipe's ten minutes suits small ramekins; a single soufflé dish will need longer, and will still be soft in the middle.
- Partridge, and what to use insteadGrey or red-legged partridge is a small bird, perhaps 8-12 oz dressed, so "the remains of cold partridge" is a modest amount of dark, dry meat. Farmed partridge is available from game dealers in Britain; elsewhere the leftovers of a roast pheasant, guinea fowl, quail or the thigh meat of a roast chicken will stand in. In the United States wild-shot game generally cannot be sold commercially, though farm-raised birds can.
- The carcass stockAn hour and a half of simmering to reduce a pint by half is the whole flavour of the dish. Use unsalted stock rather than water if you have it, and skim; you will need only a small part of the finished sauce, so any surplus keeps.
- Onion stuck with clovesA peeled onion with six whole cloves pushed into it, lifted out and discarded before the stock is used. Six cloves in a pint is assertive by current taste — three or four is plenty.
- Pounding the meatA mortar was the usual way to get a smooth paste in a Victorian kitchen. A food processor does it in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, or the game turns pasty and gluey.
- Consistency is the measurement"Enough to make it the consistency of ordinary mince" is the only guide given for the sauce, and it is a good one: thick, spoonable, not runny. Too much brown sauce and the whites cannot lift it.
- Yield and servingOne partridge's worth of meat will probably fill only a few small ramekins -- a first course or savoury, not a main. Send them to table straight from the oven, since they sink quickly.
Partridge shooting in Britain opened on 1 September, and Victorian cookery books carry a large number of recipes for game croquettes, salmis, puddings and "soufflés" that use up the remains of a roast bird. The word soufflé here is used loosely, as it often was in nineteenth-century English cookery books: the French sense of a base lightened with beaten whites is honoured, but the base is a brown roux sauce and pounded meat rather than a milk béchamel, and the result is close to a quenelle mixture baked in cups. The brown roux, the clove-stuck onion and the mortar all belong to the vocabulary of the professional kitchen that Cassell's was translating for the middle-class household.