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Boudins à la Richelieu
Ingredients.
One Egg. Half a pound of Chicken.
Half a gill of White Sauce.
Half a gill of Cream.
One ounce of Panada.
This is an ingredient list rather than a full method — the book assumes you already know how a chicken boudin is built. Here is what the quantities mean and what the missing steps are.
- GillsThe imperial gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill is about 2½ fl oz (roughly 70 ml) each of white sauce and cream. An American gill is 4 fl oz, so half a gill by American measure would be only 2 fl oz; imperial is the likelier reading for a book using gills and ounces.
- PanadaThe binder, not a garnish. One ounce (30 g) of panada here means a stiff cooked paste of flour or breadcrumbs with milk or stock, cooked until it leaves the side of the pan and cooled completely before use. Warm panada will slacken the forcemeat.
- White sauceIn a book of this class this most likely means a velouté made with chicken stock, or a tight béchamel, rather than a thin modern pourable white sauce. It should be thick enough to hold a spoon mark.
- The chickenHalf a pound (225 g) of chicken, presumably raw breast meat with skin and sinew removed. No method is given, but period practice for a forcemeat of this kind was to pound the meat in a mortar and force it through a fine sieve; a food processor does the same work in a minute, but keep everything cold or the mixture will split when the cream goes in.
- The hinge: test before you shapePoach a teaspoon of the mixture in barely trembling salted water. If it falls apart, add a little more panada; if it is rubbery and tight, loosen with cream. Everything else in the dish depends on getting this right.
- Shaping and cookingBoudins are piped or rolled into small cylinders about the size of a finger, poached gently in stock or salted water kept well below a simmer (around 170F/75C is a serviceable modern guide) until just firm, then cooled, egg-and-breadcrumbed and fried or gratinated. Never let the poaching liquid boil — it blows the forcemeat open.
- RichelieuThe classical Richelieu garnish is stuffed tomatoes and stuffed mushrooms with braised lettuce and château potatoes, sent up with a madeira-scented demi-glace. The name is also attached to dishes simply egg-and-breadcrumbed and fried, which may be the sense intended for a boudin.
- YieldThis quantity makes roughly six to eight small boudins — an entrée for three or four by period standards, where the course was one of many, or a starter for two today.
A boudin in classical French kitchen usage is anything shaped like a small sausage, and by the late nineteenth century the term had drifted a long way from the black and white boudins of the charcutier: in restaurant and cookery-school work it meant a delicate poached forcemeat, first cousin to the quenelle, moulded into cylinders and finished with crumbs. Dishes carrying the name Richelieu are, by culinary tradition rather than documented fact, often traced to the eighteenth-century duc de Richelieu, a byword for luxurious eating, though the name is variously given to the Cardinal as well; the garnish codified under that name testingstuffed tomatoes and mushrooms, braised lettuce, ch testing teau potatoes testing belongs to the nineteenth-century grande cuisine that Escoffier later set down in writing. The page here gives four ingredients and no instructions at all.