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WOOD-HENS, PAIN OF (Swedish fashion)
Take the meat from the breasts of three wood-hens (gelinottes), pare, pound it in a mortar, and when converted into paste add, by degrees, half its volume of good butter and five or six yolks of eggs. Season the preparation, pass it through a sieve, put it into a kitchen basin, work it with a wooden spoon for a few minutes, then introduce into it the white of an egg whipped up, and about the same quantity of whipped cream. When well mixed up, pour the preparation into a timbale mould, and poach in the "bain-marie" for twenty-five minutes. When about to serve turn it out on a dish, and mask with a little bechamel sauce, reduced with a few table-spoonfuls of meat-glaze.
A classic pain — a poached forcemeat loaf, closer to a mousseline than to anything baked. The technique survives intact in modern kitchens; only the bird and the equipment need translating.
- Keep everything coldButter, egg, cream and meat are best kept cool while being worked, or the emulsion can break and the pain weep fat in the mould. Chill the bowl and the puree between stages, and fold the whipped cream in over ice.
- GelinottesThe hazel grouse, Bonasa bonasia, a small northern woodland bird sold in Sweden as jarpe. It is not on sale in Britain or North America. Three birds' breasts give roughly 10-12 oz of meat; the same weight of skinless quail, partridge or guinea fowl breast behaves the same way, and plain chicken breast makes a milder version.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in under a minute. The sieving is not optional decoration — pushing the paste through a fine drum sieve or tamis removes sinew and is what gives the finished pain its texture.
- ProportionsHalf the meat's volume in butter is generous by modern taste; by weight it works out at roughly half as much butter as meat. Five or six yolks to under a pound of meat is likewise rich. Four yolks and rather less butter give a lighter set that still holds.
- The bain-marieButter the timbale, cover with buttered paper or foil, and set it in a roasting tin of hot water reaching two-thirds up the mould. The book says only to poach in the bain-marie; in a modern kitchen a stovetop bath at a bare shiver, or a moderate oven, will do. The water must never boil, or the eggs curdle and the loaf goes grainy.
- Twenty-five minutes, verifiedTwenty-five minutes -- That timing assumes a small mould. Check with a probe: the centre should read about 165F, and a skewer should come out clean. A quart mould will need considerably longer, on the order of 40-50 minutes. Rest it ten minutes before turning out or it will slump.
- Meat-glazeGlace de viande — brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets solid when cold. A tablespoon or two stirred into warm bechamel is what makes the sauce taste of game rather than of flour. Commercial demi-glace or a reduced game stock stands in.
- YieldA pint-and-a-half mould serves six as a first course, four as a light main with the sauce and something green.
A pain in nineteenth-century French kitchen French is not bread but a moulded, poached forcemeat, first cousin to the quenelle and the mousseline, and the whole family depends on the same trick of beating fat and egg into pounded flesh and then lightening it with whipped cream. The "Swedish fashion" tag points at the bird rather than the method: the hazel grouse, gelinotte in France and jarpe in Sweden, was a prized Scandinavian and Russian export, arriving in western European game markets frozen or barrelled through the winter. Cassell's assembled its Dictionary of Cookery in parts through the 1870s, complete around 1877, by sweeping up recipes from the French repertoire alongside plain English household cooking, which is why a dish requiring a mortar, a tamis and a bain-marie sits a few pages from instructions for boiling a pudding. Its presence here says less about what Victorian households actually ate than about what an ambitious cook was expected to be able to look up.