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Turkey, Fillets Of
Cut the breast of a cooked turkey in fillets. Put some veal stock into a stewpan with an onion and a bunch of sweet herbs; let it boil rather more than half an hour; strain and thicken it with white roux and a little cream. Heat up the fillets in this; add salt and pepper, a squeeze of lemon, a little finely-minced parsley, and serve.
A use-up dish for cold roast turkey breast, built on a quick velouté. The whole thing hinges on gentle reheating: the sauce should barely tremble, or already-cooked breast meat turns dry and stringy.
- FilletsHere "fillets" means neat slices carved off the cooked breast; the recipe gives no thickness. Cold, firm meat slices far more cleanly than warm.
- White rouxEqual weights butter and flour cooked together two or three minutes without colouring. The recipe specifies no quantities; a light coating sauce takes roughly 1 oz each of butter and flour to a pint of stock.
- Veal stockThe recipe calls for a light, unsalted veal stock; a good unsalted chicken stock is the closest modern equivalent. Avoid dark or heavily reduced stock, which will muddy what is meant to be a pale sauce.
- Sweet herbsA period bouquet: parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied together, sometimes with marjoram. Tie it so it lifts out whole before straining.
- Boiling the stockThe half-hour simmer is for flavouring and reducing the stock, not for cooking anything. Do it before the roux goes in; a floured sauce left that long over direct heat can catch and scorch.
- Heating the filletsSlide the slices into the finished sauce off a hard boil and hold at about 160-170F for three or four minutes, just until hot through. Cooked turkey breast has no fat to protect it and tightens quickly.
- Lemon and creamAdd the cream first and the lemon at the very end, off the heat. Acid added to a hot cream sauce and then boiled hard may curdle it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Serve on toast, over rice, or with plain boiled potatoes.
Cassell's belongs to a run of Victorian household dictionaries that treated the second life of a joint as seriously as the first, and turkey — a bird large enough that no family finished it at one sitting — generated a long list of these entries. The technique is straightforward French kitchen practice adapted for the English home cook: a velouté, meaning a pale stock sauce thickened with white roux, enriched with cream and sharpened with lemon. Codified in professional cookery over the nineteenth century, it was standard vocabulary in domestic manuals, which is why the book can simply say "white roux" and expect to be understood.