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Woodcock, Chaud Froid Of
Truss four woodcocks, and to keep them from acquiring any colour, wrap them in buttered writing paper. Roast before a clear fire, let them get cold, and cut them into neat joints. Make a little highly-seasoned and stiffly-reduced allemande sauce. Cover the joints of woodcock evenly with this, and put them on a dish in a cold place till it is set. Put in the centre of a dish a block of fried bread three inches high and an inch and a half across. Place the woodcock round this in a pyramidal form, and ornament the dish with aspic jelly.
A cold entrée in the classic French manner: roast game, jointed, masked in a set sauce and built into a pyramid. The whole thing lives or dies on the sauce being reduced stiff enough to cling without sliding off.
- Chaud-froid means coldChaud-froid -- literally "hot-cold": the sauce is made hot and applied while just pourable, then chilled until it sets into an opaque coating firm enough to handle. The finished dish is served cold throughout.
- Allemande sauceA velouté (light stock thickened with blond roux) finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison and sharpened with lemon. For a coating chaud-froid it needs dissolved gelatine as well, or it will never set firm; reduce it hard so it naps the back of a spoon heavily before you add the yolks, and never let it boil after.
- Buttered writing paperOrdinary unwaxed paper of the period, used as a heat shield to stop the breasts browning. Parchment does the same job. The intent is pale flesh, since colour shows through a white sauce.
- Roast before a clear fireA bright, clear-burning coal or wood fire in front of which the birds turn on a spit: fierce radiant heat, short time. The book gives no oven equivalent; a very hot oven, roughly 425-450F for something like 12-18 minutes for a bird this size, is the nearest modern approximation, and woodcock is usually served pink.
- Trussed, and traditionally undrawnVictorian kitchens roasted woodcock with the intestines left in, the beak skewered through the legs, and the trail spread on toast beneath. Nothing in this recipe requires that, and a drawn bird is easier to joint cleanly.
- Sourcing the birdsIn the United States woodcock is a migratory game bird and cannot be sold commercially, so it reaches the table only through a hunter; in Britain wild woodcock may be bought from game dealers during the open season. Four quail, or two squab jointed small, take the same treatment, though the flavour is far milder.
- Aspic jellyA clarified, well-set stock jelly, chopped for a glittering border or cut into shapes. A strong reduced game or veal stock with added gelatine, clarified with egg white, gives the clarity the dish is built around.
- The bread blockA croûton socle — a structural plinth, not something anyone eats. Cut it from a dense white loaf, fry until hard and dry, and cool completely; a warm or greasy block will slump the coated joints.
- Holding and yieldCoated joints and aspic should stay refrigerated until the moment of service and not sit out more than about two hours. Four birds make a modest cold course for about four.
Chaud-froid is one of the set pieces of grande cuisine — cooked hot, dressed cold, and named for the contradiction. Its invention is traditionally traced to an eighteenth-century French household where a chef's dish went cold before it was eaten and was found to be better for it, a story repeated in cookery books far more often than it is documented. What is certain is that by the later nineteenth century the technique was standard in professional kitchens: game or poultry jointed, masked in a sauce stiffened with gelatine, and mounted on a fried bread socle to give height on a buffet table. Cassell's includes it among a long run of woodcock preparations because the bird was a prestige item of the British game season, shot in autumn and winter. The pyramid, the aspic garnish and the invisible bread plinth are often associated with the era of service à la russe, though such display pieces span both service styles, and a cold dish was in any case expected to be looked at for some while before anyone was served from it.