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WOODCOCK, FILLETS OF (a la Talleyrand)
Take two woodcocks, truss them, and roast them, basting them well with clarified butter. Remove the fillets and put them on a plate. Remove the meat from the legs, free it from skin, and pound it in a mortar. Pound together, till smooth, four ounces of fillet of beef and two ounces of fat pork; add four ounces of panada and the pounded game, and work in two yolks of eggs. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and rub through a fine sieve. Trim the fillets neatly, cover each completely with the above mixture. When set, dip them in beaten white of egg, place in a buttered saute-pan, cover with a gill of white stock and a glass of white wine, and cook in a quick oven for twelve minutes. Drain on a cloth, and dish them up alternately with croutons of fried bread on a thin border of mashed potatoes. Serve with a game sauce (see GAME, SAUCE FOR), in which the remains, if any, of the pounded mixture may be stirred over the fire until the sauce begins to thicken.
A late-Victorian game entrée: roasted woodcock breasts jacketed in a pounded forcemeat and finished in the oven. Nothing here is difficult, but the forcemeat is the whole dish and it depends on cold ingredients and a fine sieve.
- The hinge: keep the forcemeat coldBeef, fat pork, panada and game must be pounded (or pulsed in a food processor) while thoroughly chilled, or the fat smears and the coating splits in the oven. Work in short bursts, return the bowl to the refrigerator if it warms, and sieve or blitz until genuinely smooth before it goes near the fillets.
- PanadaA thick paste of bread or flour cooked with milk or stock, used to bind forcemeats. Four ounces means four ounces of the finished paste, not of dry bread; simmer about 4 oz of milk or stock with 2 oz of crumb until it leaves the side of the pan, then cool completely.
- A gillIn British measure a quarter of a pint, 5 fl oz (the US gill is 4 fl oz). "A glass of white wine" in this book is loose, but read it as roughly the same again — the liquid should come partway up the fillets, not cover them.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-450F; the book gives no temperatures. Twelve minutes at that heat sets the coating and cooks the raw beef and pork forcemeat through; if your fillets are large, check that the centre of the coating reaches 160F rather than relying on the clock.
- Getting the birdsWoodcock is a licensed game bird with a restricted season in both Britain and North America; in North America sale of the wild bird is prohibited, and in Britain it appears only occasionally from game dealers in season, so in practice it comes from a hunter. Quail, snipe or the breasts of a small wild duck take the same treatment; two birds give four small fillets.
- Trussed and roastedWoodcock was traditionally roasted undrawn, with the trail left in and the bird's own beak passed through the thighs as a skewer. If you would rather not, draw the birds and pound the liver into the forcemeat instead.
- Clarified butterUsed for basting because the milk solids in whole butter scorch at roasting heat. Ghee works identically.
- Yield and servingFour fillets serve two as a main course or four as a small entrée. Pipe or spread the mashed potato as a low ring on a warm platter, alternate fillets and fried croutons around it, and sauce at the table — the coating softens quickly under liquid.
The name is generally traced to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the French diplomat whose table was as famous as his politics and whose kitchens employed Antonin Carême in the early nineteenth century; dishes styled à la Talleyrand tend to signal richness and truffle or Madeira in the classical repertoire, though the label was applied loosely by later writers and the version here keeps only the luxury, not any documented original. Woodcock itself was a prized small game bird in Victorian Britain, usually served whole on toast so the trail could be spread on it — which makes this recipe faintly extravagant even by the standards of the period, since it dismantles two of them to produce four coated fillets. That impulse to bone, pound, sieve and reassemble is the signature of the professional kitchens the book was translating for the middle-class household: a great deal of labour spent making a small bird look like a composed entrée.