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Garniture à la Jardinière
This consists of carrots and turnips scooped out with a small vegetable scoop, cooked in salted water, seasoned with a pinch of sugar and butter, to which are added cooked green peas, French beans cut in short pieces, and sprigs of cooked cauliflower; sprouts, or other seasonable vegetables may be added. Warm up this jardinière; add a ladleful of Espagnole sauce, a small piece of butter, and seasoning.
P.S.-Veal or chicken can be prepared in the same manner as the pheasant.
A classic French vegetable garnish, written for a professional kitchen that already had stock, sauce and blanched vegetables to hand. The whole point is that each vegetable keeps its own colour and bite, so the hinge is cooking them separately and combining them only at the last moment.
- Cook each vegetable apartCarrots and turnips take several minutes longer than peas or beans, and cauliflower will collapse if it sits in the pot. Boil each in salted water until just tender, drain, and hold them separately; they are only brought together in the final warming with butter and sauce.
- The vegetable scoopThis is a parisienne scoop or small melon baller; the recipe says only 'small', so the exact size is a matter of judgement. Small carrot and turnip balls cook evenly and look deliberate; batons of similar size are an acceptable substitute if you have no scoop.
- Sugar and butterThe pinch of sugar with butter most likely functions as a glaze rather than a sweetener, though the recipe describes no separate glazing step. If you glaze, toss the drained carrots and turnips in a wide pan with butter and a little sugar over moderate heat until they take on a light gloss, a minute or two, no more.
- Espagnole sauceA brown sauce built on a brown roux, mirepoix and rich veal or beef stock, reduced and strained. It is not sold in supermarkets; any well-reduced, glossy brown stock-based sauce will fill the same role. A ladleful here means enough to coat and bind, not enough to swamp; the recipe gives no measure and no number of servings.
- No quantities are givenAs a garnish, the proportions are the cook's judgement. For four people, figure on about 150 g each of carrot and turnip before scooping, 100 g peas, 100 g French beans and a small head of cauliflower broken into small sprigs.
- "Other seasonable vegetables"Broad beans, small artichoke bottoms, asparagus tips or button onions all belong in the same family. Avoid anything watery or strongly flavoured, which will muddy the sauce.
- The postscriptThe line about veal and chicken refers to the pheasant recipe this garnish accompanied in the original book, not to the vegetables. Read it as a note on the meat, not an instruction here.
- ServingWarm the finished jardinière through only long enough to heat it; a garnish held on the stove turns grey and soft. Spoon it around the meat or fish at the moment of sending it out.
À la jardinière is generally rendered as "in the gardener's manner" — a garnish of spring and summer vegetables, each cooked separately and arranged for contrast of colour, which appears in French professional cookery from the nineteenth century onward and was codified in the repertoire that Escoffier later set down. Books of this kind treated garnishes as standing preparations: the cook learned the jardinière once, then applied it to pheasant, veal, chicken or a braised fish as the menu required, which is why the entry ends with a postscript pointing back at another dish. The scooped carrot and turnip balls are the signature, and they mark the period as much as any ingredient does — a labour-intensive flourish that made sense only in a kitchen with several pairs of hands.