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Pepper and Salt (Breadcrumbs One gill)
Breadcrumbs. One gill of Demi-glace Sauce.
A Jardinière of Vegetables.
One Pheasant. Three ounces of Butter. One gill of Allemande Sauce. One Egg. Remove the fillets from a pheasant; flatten them with a cutlet-bat, cut into neat heart-shapes, season with pepper and salt. Dissolve half an ounce of butter in a sauté-pan; put in the fillets and fry a little on both sides until firm. Place them between two tin sheets, and press lightly until cold. Trim them neatly; dip them in nearly cold Allemande sauce; set them to cool; when cold, egg and breadcrumb them twice, and put them on a plate.
Fry the épigrammes in clarified butter or lard; put short bones in the small ends; dish them up in a circle on the forcemeat border; fill the centre of the border with a garnishing à la jardinière ; pour some demi-glace sauce round the dish, and serve.
This is the tail end of a longer recipe — the ingredient list has been cut off mid-line, so the forcemeat border, the eggs and the pheasant itself appear only in the method. Read the instructions first and assemble a list from them.
- A gillAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, a little over half a US cup. That is enough demi-glace to pool around a single dish, not to sauce it generously.
- Allemande sauceA velouté enriched with egg yolks and cream, reduced until it coats heavily. Carême counted it among the grand sauces; later classification, following Escoffier, treats it as a derivative of velouté. It must be almost cold and very stiff before the fillets go into it, or nothing will cling.
- The hinge: press them coldPressing between two tin sheets flattens the fillets evenly and sets the shape. Warm fillets will not take an even coat of Allemande, and untrimmed ones will not hold the heart shape through two breadings. Do not rush this stage or skip the chilling between coats.
- Egg and breadcrumb twiceTwo full coats, each set in the fridge before the next, are what keep the sauce inside from bursting out in the fat. Use dry white crumbs, not panko, which reads wrong on a dish of this vintage.
- Frying temperatureClarified butter or lard over moderate heat, so the double crumb does not colour before the inside is hot through. The first sauté only takes the fillets as far as 'firm', so this frying has to finish the cooking as well as brown the crust.
- Pheasant quantityOne bird yields two breast fillets, which trim down to only a few small hearts. The recipe names no number of servings, so scale the birds to the size of circle you want, or buy breasts separately from a game dealer.
- Jardiniere and forcemeat borderJardinière and forcemeat border -- A jardinière is mixed vegetables cut in small batons, conventionally carrot and turnip with peas or beans, cooked separately and then bound in butter. The forcemeat border is a ring of pounded game or veal farce piped or moulded onto the dish and set — a Victorian serving device that a shallow platter with a mound of vegetables at the centre reproduces just as well.
- Short bonesThe bones pushed into the narrow ends are decorative cutlet-frills in disguise, a way of making a boneless fillet read as a chop. Paper cutlet frills do the same job and are easier to source.
- Cutlet-batA heavy flat mallet. A meat pounder or the flat of a small heavy pan works; flatten between sheets of plastic so the lean breast does not tear.
Epigrammes are a piece of French kitchen wit: the classic version pairs two cuts of lamb — a slice of braised breast, egged and crumbed, alongside a plain cutlet — and the name is generally traced to an eighteenth-century anecdote about a diner who mistook the word epigramme for a dish. By the late nineteenth century the term had loosened to mean any small, trimmed, breadcrumbed cutlet-shaped piece, and game birds were fair play. The method here — cook, press cold, coat in a setting sauce, crumb twice, fry — is pure high-Victorian restaurant practice, descended from Careme and codified for British kitchens by Escoffier's generation. It belongs to a period when a pheasant was as likely to be broken down into shapely fillets and rebuilt on a forcemeat plinth as it was to be roasted whole, and when the labour to do so was assumed.