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Truffle Puree
Wash, brush, and peel half a pound of fresh truffles. Pound them with an ounce of butter and press them through a hair sieve. Put them into a stewpan with half a pint of good brown sauce, and let them boil for ten minutes. Just before serving the puree, dissolve an ounce of glaze and an ounce of butter in it, and, if obtainable, add to it two table-spoonfuls of essence of truffles. Time to boil, ten minutes.
A dense truffle sauce built on the classic brown sauce base. The cost of the main ingredient today makes the whole exercise a special-occasion proposition, and the technique changes accordingly.
- Half a pound of fresh trufflesAt current prices this is a luxury few will replicate; 225 g of fresh black winter truffle is a substantial outlay. Preserved truffles in jars, or a much smaller quantity of fresh with truffle juice from the tin, will get you closer to plausible.
- PeelingVictorian recipes routinely direct that truffles be peeled. Modern black truffles need only a firm scrub with a brush under cold water; the peelings carry plenty of aroma, so do not throw them away if you do peel.
- Heat is the enemyTen minutes at a boil drives off most of the volatile aromatics that justify the price. Bring the sauce to a bare simmer, add the truffle, and hold it below a boil for two or three minutes only, off the heat if possible.
- Brown sauceHalf a pint is a scant cup and a quarter (US) of espagnole or a well-reduced demi-glace. A good reduced veal or beef stock, lightly thickened, does the same job without the multi-day espagnole process.
- GlazeAn ounce of "glaze" is meat glaze -- stock reduced to a syrupy, tacky concentrate. Commercial demi-glace concentrate or a spoonful of reduced stock substitutes directly.
- Essence of trufflesA commercial flavouring of the period, generally a truffle infusion in wine or spirit. The juice from a tin of preserved truffles, or a teaspoon of truffle-infused Madeira, is the nearest equivalent. Avoid synthetic truffle oil here, which reads as chemical against real truffle.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve, of the sort standard in period kitchens for passing fine purees. A nylon drum sieve or fine chinois works; pounding in a mortar rather than a food processor keeps the texture from turning to paste.
- YieldAppreciably more than a cup: the half-pint of sauce alone is about a cup and a quarter (US) before the pounded truffle, butter, glaze and essence are added. It is an accompaniment to poultry, veal or eggs, not a dish in itself. Spoon it out sparingly.
Truffle puree belongs to the grand-sauce apparatus of nineteenth-century French professional cooking, which reached English kitchens through the works of Carême and Soyer and their many imitators. It is a component rather than a dish: a base to be spread under a fillet, folded into a forcemeat, or thinned into a sauce for poultry. The presence of "essence of truffles" as an optional shop-bought item is a useful reminder that Victorian cooks bought prepared flavourings as readily as we do -- glazes, essences and bottled sauces were staples of the well-stocked larder. Truffles themselves are often said to have been more accessible to the English upper-middle-class kitchen than they are now, though the book's insistence on "fresh" marks the difference between a good result and an indifferent one even then.