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Oval Soufflée Cases
Chop the chicken, ham, and mushrooms up finely. Melt half an ounce of butter in a stewpan; when hot put in the shalot finely chopped, fry it a little, stir in the flour, and cook it, stirring for a few minutes; moisten it gradually with about half a gill of stock, let it come to the boil, mix in the chopped meat, add a teaspoonful of chopped parsley and a few drops of lemon juice; bind with the yolk of one egg, season with pepper, salt, and a little grated nutmeg. Let it get thoroughly hot, and spread it on a plate to cool. Make it up into neatly even-sized cork shapes (the right size for the paper cases), wrap each carefully in a square of pig's caul, fasten the ends with a little white of egg, and let them stand a few minutes to set.
Butter the inside of the paper cases: fry sufficient parsley to form a little bed in each case; melt the remainder of the butter in a sauté-pan, put in the andouillettes, and fry a golden colour over a moderate fire, or in the oven. When done, take them up, drain them on paper or cloth, put them on a baking-tin, brush the surface of each with liquid meat glaze, pass in the oven for another minute, and put them on the beds of fried parsley in the paper cases. Dish up, and serve with a boat of piquante or tomato sauce.
P.S.-Any kind of game, veal, pork, or other meat may be substituted for chicken, but the name then changes to Andouillettes de Ciber, Andouillettes de Veau, etc.
Cailles en Pilaff. (Quails served on Rice.) Ingredients.
A late-Victorian dressed savoury: a thick chicken-and-ham salpicon rolled into corks, wrapped in caul fat, fried, glazed and set in buttered paper cases. The heading and section are a printer's mismatch — this is the andouillettes recipe, and the quail dish begins in the last line.
- Half a gill of stockIn an English cookery book a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, so half a gill is about 2½ fl oz (roughly 70 ml). It is meant to make a very stiff mixture, not a sauce: it must hold a shape cold.
- The hinge — bind off the heatThe egg yolk goes in to thicken and set, but once it is in, the pan must not boil or the yolk will curdle and the filling will break when you roll it. Warm it through gently, then spread thin on a plate so it cools fast.
- Chill before shapingThe original says only "cool". Refrigerate until genuinely firm, an hour or more; warm salpicon will not form clean corks and the caul will slide off.
- Pig's caulThe lacy membrane from around the stomach, sold as caul fat or crépine by butchers and halal and Chinese suppliers, usually frozen and salted. Soak in cool water to unfurl and rinse off the salt, then pat dry before wrapping; it melts away in the pan and needs no other fastening beyond the smear of egg white.
- Paper casesThese are the small oval or round soufflé cases of the period, made of stiff paper, not modern fluted cupcake liners, which will not hold their shape. Butter them well; in the recipe the andouillettes are fried, glazed and reheated separately and only set into the cases at the end.
- "A moderate fire, or in the oven"Moderate here is a steady medium heat on the hob, or a moderate oven; the book gives no temperatures. Allow roughly 8–10 minutes to colour and heat through, turning once.
- Liquid meat glazeGlace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets to a rubbery block cold. Warm a spoonful to brush on. A heavily reduced good stock does the same job; commercial demi-glace concentrate is the nearest shortcut.
- Fried parsleyDry the sprigs completely before they go near hot fat, or the oil will erupt. They need 20–30 seconds at frying heat and should stay green — brown parsley is bitter.
- YieldThe recipe gives no count. Filling based on a cup or so of chopped cooked chicken, ham and mushrooms makes roughly eight to ten corks, one or two per person as a savoury course.
An andouillette in France is a coarse tripe-and-chitterling sausage, and the name here is borrowed rather than literal: what the recipe actually makes is a crépinette, a small flat forcemeat parcel wrapped in caul fat, the membrane that professional kitchens used as a self-basting, self-sealing casing. The P.S. — swap in game, veal or pork and rename the dish accordingly — shows how these late nineteenth-century "high class" manuals worked, teaching a method under a French label that could be varied indefinitely for the menu card. Paper cases were part of the same idea: a single portion arriving in its own vessel suited service à la russe, where dishes were plated and handed round rather than set out whole, and they were a standard vehicle for the small savoury course that followed the sweet at an English dinner.