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Woodcock, Fillets of, with Truffle Puree
Remove the fillets of six woodcocks; trim and put them in a buttered saute-pan; sprinkle them with salt and pepper; pour a little clarified butter over them, cover them with a round of buttered paper, and cook them over a slow fire. Dish them in a circle round a croustade of fried bread. Fill the croustade with truffle puree, pour some of the gravy from the saute-pan over the fillets, and serve. The truffle puree is made as follows. Take half a pound of well-cleaned and peeled truffles; pound them in a mortar with an ounce of butter, and press them through a hair sieve. Reduce three gills of Espagnole sauce by one-third, and add the puree to it. Before serving, boil up the puree, and thicken it with an ounce of butter and an ounce of glaze. Probable cost, uncertain.
A grande-cuisine game course from the end of the nineteenth century, built on two things a modern cook has to plan for: wild woodcock and half a pound of truffles. The cooking itself is a matter of minutes.
- The hinge: the fillets are barely cookedWoodcock breast is dark, lean and dries out quickly. "A slow fire" here means gentle heat under the buttered paper, and the cooking is a matter of minutes rather than a long braise. Anything approaching well done makes it liver-like and dry.
- What a fillet isThe two breast muscles lifted off the crown of each bird. Six woodcock give twelve small fillets, which is a course for six people at most, arranged around the croustade.
- Sourcing the birdsWoodcock is legal seasonal game in Britain and available from game dealers in autumn and winter; in the United States wild game birds cannot be sold, so American cooks need a hunter. There is no farmed substitute with the same flavour, though snipe or teal breasts behave similarly in the pan.
- GillsA British gill is 5 fl oz, so three gills of Espagnole is 15 fl oz, reduced by a third to about 10 fl oz. That reduced sauce plus half a pound of truffle purée gives a very thick, almost spoonable filling, which is what the croustade wants.
- TrufflesHalf a pound of fresh black truffle is now a luxury out of all proportion to the rest of the dish; the Victorian kitchen bought them preserved in tins as well as fresh. A workable modern version uses a much smaller quantity of fresh truffle with a purée of well-browned mushrooms as the body, finished with truffle at the end.
- Espagnole and glazeEspagnole is the brown mother sauce built on brown roux and veal stock. The ounce of "glaze" is glace de viande — stock reduced to a syrup — which the recipe uses, with the butter, to finish and thicken the puree, adding gloss and depth; commercial demi-glace or a hard-reduced brown stock stands in.
- KitA hair sieve is a fine drum sieve or tamis; any fine mesh works. The round of buttered paper is what a modern kitchen calls a cartouche, cut to fit inside the pan. The croustade here is simply a case of fried bread, hollowed to take the puree.
- Butter temperatureClarified butter is specified because whole butter, with its milk solids, would brown and burn at the edges of the pan over the cooking time. Keep the heat gentle so it never colours.
Cassell's belongs to the last generation of English cookery books written when wild woodcock was ordinary market game rather than a rarity, and the note "probable cost, uncertain" is one Cassell's routinely gives for game not normally bought. The bird was traditionally the most flattered of small game: it is classically roasted undrawn, the trail spread on toast beneath it, on the grounds that its digestive tract is clean enough to eat. This recipe does the opposite, discarding the carcass in favour of the two breast fillets and dressing them in the full apparatus of the professional kitchen — Espagnole, glace de viande, a fried croustade, a truffle purée pushed through a hair sieve. That is the style of the great hotel and club kitchens, where a dozen small fillets and a heap of trimmings for stock were an acceptable use of six birds, and it explains why the dish reads as an assembly of sauces with a little meat attached.