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POULARDES (a'la Rossini)
Take two poulardes, and well clean out the stomach. Take immediately four pullets, strip off the flesh and pound it in a mortar, adding the whites of four eggs with pepper and salt. Pass the whole through a sieve. Place it immediately in a dish and on ice. Mix one and a half pints of cream little by little, whisking the same with a wooden spatula. Add half a pound of plump truffles cut in small pieces, one pound of fresh foie gras cut up; fill the interior of the poulardes with this mixture and do not tie them up too tight. Cook gently in an oven for two hours in a braising-pan with two quarts of stock. Let it cool and sprinkle it with lukewarm white sauce. Decorate with truffles and dress with whole truffles around, with a fresh foie gras cooked in aspic. One might add a skewer on each poularde, and one in the middle of the dish, each garnished with a whole truffle.
This is a grande cuisine set piece: two birds stuffed with a chicken-and-cream mousseline studded with truffle and foie gras, poached in stock, then glazed cold. The forcemeat is the whole dish, and it stands or falls on temperature.
- Keep everything at refrigerator temperatureThe pounded pullet flesh, the egg whites and the cream must all stay ice cold, and the cream must go in a little at a time as the original insists. Warm meat or cream added too fast breaks the emulsion and the stuffing weeps fat and liquid as it cooks.
- Poularde and pulletA poularde is a young hen fattened and not allowed to lay, roughly 3 1/2 to 5 lb dressed; a large free-range roasting chicken is the practical substitute. The recipe strips the flesh from four pullets; scaled against the pint and a half of cream and the four whites, roughly 2 lb of boneless raw chicken makes a workable mousseline.
- "Well clean out the stomach"This means drawing the bird and removing the crop and cavity fat so the cavity is dry and empty. Wipe it out rather than rinsing; a wet cavity thins the forcemeat.
- Sieving, then and nowThe mortar-and-sieve routine exists to get an absolutely smooth paste. A food processor does it in a minute, but pulse in short bursts and chill the bowl, since friction heat is exactly what ruins mousseline.
- Do not overfillThe instruction not to tie the birds too tight is not politeness. The forcemeat swells as the egg white sets, and a tightly trussed, tightly packed bird splits along the breast.
- Oven temperature"Cook gently" in a covered braising-pan with stock means a slow oven, about 300 to 325F, so the liquid barely trembles. Two hours is plausible for two large stuffed birds, but go by an instant-read thermometer pushed into the centre of the forcemeat: 165F there, and the bird itself will be well past done.
- Truffles and foie grasHalf a pound of truffle and a pound of raw foie gras is period proportion for a banquet dish and represents most of the cost. Preserved truffle peelings and a good duck foie gras terrine, diced and folded in at the last moment, give the flavour without the outlay.
- The "lukewarm white sauce"This is a chaud-froid: a white sauce enriched with aspic or gelatine, cooled to the point where it coats the back of a spoon but still flows. Too warm and it runs off the cold bird; too cool and it sets in ridges. Apply in thin successive coats over a chilled, dried surface.
- SkewersThe garnished skewers are hatelets, ornamental picks, often silver, used on dressed presentation work. They are there for the look of the dish rather than as part of the portion.
- YieldTwo stuffed birds with garnish will serve twelve to sixteen as a cold course, and it is meant to be carved in slices that show the truffle in the pale forcemeat.
Dishes labelled à la Rossini honour the composer Gioachino Rossini, a famous gourmand who spent his later years in Paris, and the name became shorthand in nineteenth-century French kitchens for anything lavished with truffle and foie gras — tournedos Rossini being the survivor most people know. Cassell's, an English household dictionary compiled at the height of Victorian enthusiasm for French restaurant cookery, includes it: the cold glazed presentation, the chaud-froid coating and the ornamental skewers all belong to buffet service, where a dish was built to be looked at down the length of a table before it was eaten. Attributions of this kind are traditional rather than documented, and there is no evidence Rossini devised any particular version himself.