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PHEASANT, BOUDINS OF (a la Richelieu)
Pick the meat from a cold pheasant. Carefully remove the skin and sinews, and pound the flesh in a mortar to a smooth paste. Supposing there to be twelve ounces of pheasant-meat, mix with it twelve ounces of pounded potatoes, or eight ounces of panada (see PANADA), and six ounces of fresh butter. Mix these ingredients thoroughly, pound them together, and season rather highly with salt, cayenne, and powdered mace. Bind the mixture together with the unbeaten yolks of five eggs added one at a time, the whites of two, two table-spoonfuls of white sauce, and, last of all, two table-spoonfuls of boiled onions chopped small. As it is very important that the preparation should be as light and spongy as possible, it is well to test a small quantity by making it up into a ball and poaching it in hot water, so that if it is not of the proper consistency, it may be made so before the whole is cooked. If not firm enough, more eggs should be added. If too firm, add a small quantity of water. Spread the forcemeat out on a dish, and make it up into small cutlets, about three inches long, two inches wide, and a quarter of an inch thick. Drop these carefully into very hot water, and poach them gently for a few minutes. The water should not be allowed to boil, or the boudins will be spoilt. Take them up, drain well, let them get cold, then dip them into egg and bread-crumbs, and fry in hot butter until they are lightly browned. Serve in a circle on a hot dish, and send some good gravy to table in a tureen. The gravy may be made as follows. Peel and slice four onions. Fry them in butter until they are lightly browned, dredge an ounce of flour over them, and pour upon them half a pint of stock, or, failing this, a tea-spoonful of Bovril dissolved in half a pint of boiling water. Add a glassful of sherry or claret, the bones of the pheasant broken into small pieces, and a little pepper and salt. Simmer the sauce over a gentle fire for twenty minutes, strain through a sieve, and it is ready for use. Time, four or five minutes to simmer the boudins. To be fried in hot fat until they are lightly browned. Probable cost of pheasants, 3s. each when in full season. Sufficient boudins made from the flesh of a moderate-sized pheasant for six or eight persons.
A classic quenelle forcemeat handled as cutlets: pounded, poached, then crumbed and fried. The technique is sound, and a food processor removes nearly all the labour.
- The hinge: never let the water boilPoach the boudins at a bare shiver, around 170-175F, with the surface barely trembling. A rolling boil bursts the egg-bound forcemeat and the cutlets break up or turn coarse and dry.
- Mortar to food processorPulse the picked meat to a paste in a processor, then add the potato or panada and cold butter and run until smooth. Keep everything cold; a warm mixture separates and the butter weeps out during poaching.
- PanadaA thick binding paste of bread or flour cooked in milk or stock, reduced until it leaves the sides of the pan and cooled before use. The recipe offers it as an alternative to the pounded potato, at eight ounces against twelve.
- Test the mixture, seriouslyThe instruction to poach a small ball first is the most useful line in the recipe. Taste it as well as judging texture: seasoning that is right in the raw paste can read flat once cooked, which may be why the original says to season rather highly.
- Bovril and the gravyBovril is a concentrated beef extract, still sold; a teaspoon in half a pint of water is a thin beef bouillon and any decent stock beats it. Half a pint here is the imperial half-pint, about 10 fl oz or 1 1/4 cups.
- Pheasant weightsA moderate hen pheasant may yield less than the twelve ounces of picked meat the recipe assumes, so weigh what you get and make up any shortfall with a second bird or with chicken thigh. Farmed pheasant is milder and moister than wild; wild birds hung any length of time will dominate the seasoning.
- Shot and sinewWith a shot bird, work the meat over carefully for pellets before it goes near the processor, and strip every tendon from the legs. Both survive pounding and ruin the smooth paste.
- FryingFry the chilled, crumbed cutlets in clarified butter or a butter and oil mix over medium heat; whole butter at the temperature needed for browning will scorch before the crust colours.
- YieldSix to eight as a made dish in a Victorian menu, which is generous. Reckon on four modern main-course portions, with rice or a purée and the onion gravy handed separately.
Boudin in French cookery originally means a sausage, black or white, but by the nineteenth century the word had been borrowed for these small poached forcemeat shapes, close kin to the quenelle and the chicken boudin blanc of the professional kitchen. The Richelieu style generally refers to a dish crumbed and fried to a light brown, and the name is traditionally said to honour the eighteenth-century duc de Richelieu, a marshal of France whose table was famous enough that cooks are supposed to have attached his name to a whole family of preparations, though Cardinal Richelieu is just as commonly cited. Cassell's may include it because a cold pheasant was a real domestic problem: game arrived at the house whole, often in pairs, and a Victorian cook might well be expected to turn Monday's leavings into something that could be sent to table in its own right rather than as recognisable cold meat. The stated price of three shillings a bird places it well above everyday meat and marks this as a dish for a household that shot, or knew someone who did.