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Ragout Financiere
Prepare and cook equal quantities of mushrooms, quenelles, cock's-combs, cock's kernels, scallops of sweetbread, and sliced truffles. Let these articles be as nearly as possible of uniform size, put them into a saucepan, and pour over them as much good brown sauce as will barely cover them. Add a glassful of light wine, place the saucepan on a gentle fire, and let its contents simmer gently until they are thoroughly hot. This ragout is used for garnishing various dishes. Time to heat the ragout, three minutes.
This is a garnish, not a dish: every component is cooked separately beforehand, and the saucepan stage is only a warming-through in sauce. Read the three-minute time as a reheat, not a cooking period.
- Everything is pre-cookedThe recipe says "prepare and cook" before anything enters the saucepan: mushrooms stewed, quenelles poached, sweetbreads blanched and braised, truffles cooked. The three-minute time only makes sense if nothing goes into the pan raw.
- Cock's combs and kernelsCombs are the fleshy crest, kernels (rognons de coq) the testicles. Both required long soaking, blanching and peeling of the outer skin, and neither is stocked by ordinary butchers now. If they are left out, increase the quenelles, sweetbread and mushroom in proportion.
- Brown sauce"Good brown sauce" here most likely means an espagnole or demi-glace: brown roux with brown stock, long-simmered and skimmed. A reduced veal or beef stock thickened lightly gives similar body. It should coat the pieces, not swamp them, so "barely cover" is literal.
- A glassful of light wineA wineglassful in period usage is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz. The recipe's "light wine" suggests a dry white; later versions of a financiere garnish often use Madeira or sherry instead. Add it to the sauce and let the raw edge cook off before the garnish goes in.
- Uniform sizeThe instruction that matters: the recipe asks for the pieces to be "as nearly as possible of uniform size". Cut sweetbread scallops and mushrooms to match the diameter of the quenelles so a spoonful of garnish looks deliberate rather than scrappy.
- Gentle heat onlyQuenelles disintegrate and sweetbread goes grainy if the sauce boils. Keep it at a bare tremble and stir by shaking the pan rather than with a spoon.
- TrufflesFresh black truffle is a luxury purchase; preserved truffle peelings, added at the last moment, carry much of the aroma at a fraction of the cost. Truffle oil is not a like-for-like substitute for the sliced truffle the recipe calls for.
Financière is one of the codified garnishes of nineteenth-century French grande cuisine, and the name is generally taken to mean "in the style of the financiers" — a shorthand for expensive, since combs, kernels, sweetbreads and truffles were all costly items that demanded skilled preparation for a spoonful of result. A Victorian professional kitchen was expected to build meals from a stock of named garnishes: the same ragout dressed a vol-au-vent, a boned chicken or a beef fillet, and the menu changed while the preparation did not. The offal elements are the clearest marker of date. Cock's combs and kernels appear routinely in Carême and are still assumed in Escoffier, but they faded from English cookery in the twentieth century along with the brigade kitchens that had the hands to clean them, leaving the modern version a mushroom, quenelle, sweetbread and truffle affair.