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Turkey, with Foie Gras
Cut the breast of a cooked turkey into slices, and heat them in the gravy or sauce that has been served with it. Cut some foie gras into slices of the same size, and dish the two alternately. Mask the foie gras with rich brown sauce and the turkey with thick bchamel. Garnish with fancy-shaped croutons, masked alternately with the two sauces.
A composed dish for using up the breast of a roast turkey, built on two contrasting sauces. Nothing here is difficult; the work is in getting the slices and the coatings neat.
- Mask means coatTo "mask" is to cover a piece of food evenly with sauce so it looks glazed rather than sitting in a pool. The sauces need to be thick enough to cling — nappe consistency, coating the back of a spoon — or the plate turns into a puddle of two colours.
- Which foie grasThe recipe assumes a tinned or terrine foie gras, already cooked and firm enough to slice cold. That is what to buy. A raw lobe would need to be deveined and cooked first, and it will not slice cleanly. Note that production and sale are restricted in some jurisdictions; a good mousse or a pâté de foie will stand in for the effect.
- Do not reheat the foie grasThe turkey is warmed, the foie gras is not. Terrine foie gras collapses into fat at any real heat. Slice it cold with a knife dipped in hot water, and let the warm turkey and warm sauce bring it up to temperature on the plate.
- Warming the turkeyCooked breast meat dries out fast. Heat the gravy first, then slide the slices in off the heat and let them stand two or three minutes. Simmering them will turn already-cooked breast stringy.
- Thick béchamelMake it stiffer than a pouring béchamel — roughly 40 g each butter and flour to 500 ml milk — so it sets on the turkey rather than running. Season it well; against foie gras and brown sauce, an underseasoned white sauce disappears.
- Croûtons here are shaped breadNot the diced kind. Cut stale white bread with small fancy cutters — crescents, diamonds, rounds — and fry in clarified butter until crisp, then drain well. Mask them only at the moment of serving or they go soft.
- Quantity and servingThe book gives none. Half a turkey breast will give roughly eight to ten neat slices, depending on the bird — enough for about four as a first course; the recipe asks for foie gras slices of the same size, so allow one for each. Serve on a warmed but not hot dish, and eat promptly.
This is a réchauffé — a made dish from meat already cooked and served once — and Victorian and Edwardian cookery books are full of them, because a large roast bird in a household of any size was often expected to reappear for further meals. What lifts this one out of the leftover column is the foie gras and the pair of sauces, brown and béchamel, alternating down the dish. That two-tone arrangement echoes the French professional repertoire of the period, where symmetry and contrast on the platter mattered a great deal. Foie gras reached British kitchens largely as a tinned or potted import, Strasbourg being the best-known source, a store-cupboard luxury a cook could keep on hand.