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Partridges, Mayonnaise Of
Roast a brace of partridges, cut them into neat joints, and put them aside for a few minutes. Boil two eggs for ten minutes, put them into cold water, and when they are cold take out the yolks, put them into a basin, and rub them smooth with the back of a wooden spoon. Add a small quantity each of salt, pepper, and mixed mustard, then very gradually four table-spoonfuls of oil, one table-spoonful of tarragon vinegar, four table-spoonfuls of aspic jelly, or failing this, good stock. If liked, the jelly or stock can be omitted. Put the partridges on a dish, pour the mayonnaise gently over them to cover them, and place a few hearts of freshly cut cabbage lettuce round them. Garnish the dish with hard-boiled eggs cut into quarters lengthwise, and slices of boiled beetroot. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A cold game dish dressed with a cooked-yolk mayonnaise rather than the raw-yolk kind, which makes it unusually forgiving to assemble. The hinge is temperature: everything must be properly cold before the sauce goes on, or it will slide off the birds and pool on the dish.
- A braceTwo partridges. Modern farmed birds run about 12-16 oz each; wild grey partridge can be smaller.
- Roasting the birdsPartridge is lean and dries fast, so bard with bacon or butter well. The recipe gives no oven setting or time; roughly 400-425F for 20-25 minutes is the usual modern handling. The original says only to set the birds aside for a few minutes before jointing, though the finished dish, dressed in mayonnaise and lettuce, is clearly served cold.
- Jointing"Neat joints" is not defined in the recipe; it presumably means legs detached and each breast lifted off the bone, four to six pieces per bird. Trim the ragged edges so the sauce sits smoothly.
- The emulsionSieved hard-boiled yolks will not emulsify like raw ones; they hold the oil by absorption instead. Add the oil a few drops at a time at the start and the sauce stays thick, but expect a sauce nearer a thin dressing than a modern mayonnaise.
- Aspic jellyA savoury meat jelly, melted to liquid before it goes in. Cold jellied stock or a good reduced chicken stock does the same job; the recipe is right that you can leave it out, in which case reduce the vinegar slightly so the sauce is not sharp.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth using — it is the flavour that makes the dish read as game rather than chicken salad. White wine vinegar with a bruised tarragon sprig steeped for a day is a reasonable stand-in.
- Cabbage lettuceThe old term for heading lettuces, as opposed to cos; a butterhead such as Boston or Bibb fits the description. Use the pale inner hearts, split, not shredded leaves.
- Beetroot"Boiled beetroot" means plain-cooked, not pickled in the modern jarred sense. Slice it and lay it on at the last moment, or the red bleeds into the sauce.
- Cost and yieldThree shillings and sixpence, as stated. Four to five as a light main course, more as part of a cold table.
Cassell's gives this as an alphabetical dictionary entry, "Partridges, Mayonnaise Of," the sort of dish built for a supper table, a shooting luncheon or a buffet where everything is dressed in advance and carved nowhere near the guests. The cooked-yolk sauce is the older English "salad dressing" tradition rather than French mayonnaise proper, and it survived in domestic books long after chefs had moved to raw yolks. Aspic was the mark of a well-run late-Victorian kitchen: it was a by-product of the stockpot. Partridge itself was a seasonal shooting bird — English law has long opened the season on 1 September — so a recipe like this belonged firmly to autumn and early winter, when a brace might arrive as a gift from the country rather than as a purchase.