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Poultry, Boudins, or French Puddings, Of
Half roast the bird. Take off the skin, draw out the sinews, and mince and pound the flesh till it is quite smooth. Mix with it its bulk in baked potatoes, dry and floury, season rather highly with salt, cayenne, and pounded mace, and add as much butter as there was meat. Pound the forcemeat between every addition, then mix in gradually three whole eggs and the yolks of two others, together with one or two table-spoonfuls of white sauce, chopped mushrooms, or cooked onions, but take care that the mixture is not too moist. To ascertain this, make up a small ball, drop it into boiling water, and poach it for five minutes. If it wants firmness, put another egg to it; if it is too firm, add a little sauce or water. Form the forcemeat into small sausages or boudins, or mould them into the shape of an egg with a table-spoon: drop them then into boiling water and poach them. Serve the boudins piled high on a dish, and pour brown Italian sauce, or white sauce, round them. Before moulding the boudins, put the preparation on ice or in a cool place for a while. Time, four or five minutes to poach the boudins.
This is a quenelle in all but name: pounded poultry forcemeat, lightened with potato, poached and sauced. The technique is exacting but the recipe tells you how to test it before you commit.
- The test ball is the whole recipeDo not skip poaching a trial ball before moulding the batch. A forcemeat that is too wet collapses into shreds in the water, and one that is too stiff turns rubbery; the small ball tells you which way to correct, and the original gives both remedies.
- "Half roast the bird"Roast the bird until the flesh is set and opaque but well short of done, then cool it before boning. The point is flavour and firmness for pounding, not doneness — the boudins finish cooking in the water. The original gives no bird size, oven temperature or roasting time.
- Cook the finished boudins throughBecause the meat starts only half cooked, the stated four or five minutes is a minimum, not a guarantee. Poach egg-sized boudins until the centre reaches 165F, which will take appreciably longer than the time given; the small sausage shapes will be quicker.
- Poach, do not boilThe original says to drop them into boiling water, but holding the water at a bare simmer once they are in treats the forcemeat more kindly; a hard rolling boil can batter it apart.
- "Its bulk in baked potatoes"This is a volume measure, not a weight — equal parts minced meat and dry floury baked potato flesh. Bake the potatoes rather than boiling them, and pass them through a ricer while warm; boiled potato carries too much water for a forcemeat this delicate.
- As much butter as there was meatThe original gives no unit, so this may be bulk for bulk, as with the potato, rather than weight for weight; either way it is a very rich mixture. Less butter gives boudins that still hold and taste of the bird; the full quantity is workable but expect a very soft mixture that depends entirely on thorough chilling.
- Pounded maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself. Ground mace from a jar is fine; a quarter teaspoon per pound of meat is a fair starting point.
- Machinery instead of a mortarA food processor does in a minute what the original expects of a mortar and pestle, but pulse rather than run it, and add the butter in stages as the text directs. Overworking warm forcemeat splits the butter out.
- Brown Italian sauceSauce italienne: a brown sauce finished with finely chopped mushrooms and shallots cooked down in white wine, with herbs. A reduced chicken jus with mushroom and shallot serves the same purpose if you are not building the classical version.
- Chilling and yieldChilling -- An hour in the refrigerator makes the mixture mouldable; the original's "on ice or in a cool place" is exactly this step.
Boudin here is not the blood pudding of the same name: in nineteenth-century French cookery the word was also used for a shaped and poached forcemeat, closely related to the quenelle, and English cookery writers borrowed it along with the technique. The potato reads as domestic economy: a professional kitchen would bind its forcemeat with panada or cream, while a household book stretches a single roast bird with floury baked potato and makes a dish of it. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an alphabetical reference compiled from many hands rather than a single author's collection, is full of such adaptations, and this entry's phrasing — the trial ball, the instruction to pound between every addition — follows the careful, test-as-you-go style of English cookery writing. The insistence on pounding the flesh "quite smooth" is a reminder that before mechanical mincers and processors, texture of this kind was bought with a mortar and a good deal of labour.