Home › The Principles of Cookery › TOULOUSE RAGOUT (for garnishing large or small dishes)
TOULOUSE RAGOUT (for garnishing large or small dishes)
Cook separately equal quantities of the following ingredients, as many as may be required for the dish it is intended to garnish. Button mushrooms, cockscombs, sliced truffles, quenelles, and scallops of sweetbread. Pour over these as much nicely-flavoured white sauce as will cover them, and when they are quite hot the garnish will be ready for use. Time to simmer the whole together, three minutes.
A classic French garnish rather than a dish in itself: five components cooked separately, then bound at the last moment in white sauce. The instruction that matters is separately — each element has a different cooking time, and the three-minute simmer at the end is only to heat them through.
- What "white sauce" means hereIn a dish built on the French model this would most likely be a velouté — a blond roux let down with veal or chicken stock, sometimes enriched with cream, or finished with egg yolk as a sauce allemande. A milk-based béchamel will taste flatter against sweetbread and truffle.
- CockscombsGenuinely obsolete, and hard to source today. They were blanched, rubbed in coarse salt to strip the outer skin, then simmered in a white blanc for an hour or more. Omit them, or substitute small pieces of poached chicken breast for the pale colour and soft bite the garnish was after.
- SweetbreadsSoak in several changes of cold water for two to three hours to draw the blood, blanch from cold water, refresh, press between two plates under a weight until cold, then trim and cut into scallops. Cook them through before they join the ragout; the three-minute simmer will not do it.
- QuenellesForcemeat dumplings of pounded veal, chicken or fish with panada and egg, shaped between two teaspoons and poached in barely trembling stock until they float and firm, roughly 6-8 minutes for small ones. Water at a rolling boil breaks them.
- Button mushroomsCook them à blanc — a few minutes in water with lemon juice and a knob of butter — rather than browning them. The point of the ragoût is that everything stays pale.
- TrufflesFresh black truffle at the quantities implied is now a luxury few will match. Preserved truffle in its own juice is the practical substitute, and the juice belongs in the sauce. Truffle oil is a different flavour entirely and will dominate.
- The final simmerThree minutes is correct and should not be stretched. The components are already cooked; longer and the sweetbread scallops toughen and the quenelles begin to swell and split.
- QuantityThe original gives no measure, only 'as many as may be required for the dish it is intended to garnish.' As a modern working figure, reckon on about 2 tablespoons of the mixed garnish per plate for individual servings, and enough sauce just to coat rather than pool.
A ragoût à la Toulousaine is one of the standard garnishes of nineteenth-century French grande cuisine, attached above all to vol-au-vent à la Toulousaine and to poached chicken — the whole thing spooned into a puff-pastry case or banked around a bird. The name is generally traced to the city of Toulouse and its poultry trade rather than to any single cook, and the pale palette of the garnish, everything white or near-white apart from the truffle, was the point: this was food built to look expensive on a silver dish under candlelight. The cockscombs are the clearest marker of the period. They were a badge of the classical repertoire, fiddly and unimprovingly bland.