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Poulet à la Navar
Ingredients.
One Chicken trussed for roasting.
One pint of White Chaudfroid Sauce.
Socle of Rice (oval shaped).
Mixture for filling Breast.
Half a pound of cold cooked Chicken.
Half a pint of Cream.
One gill of Aspic Jelly.
Half terrain Foie Gras.
Half a teaspoonful of Anchovy Essence.
One Truffle (chopped).
For Decoration (Half a pint of Aspic Jelly)
Half a pint of Aspic Jelly.
Truffle. Chopped Pistachio Nut.
Boil the chicken, taking care not to break the legs. Allow it to get cold, then remove the fillets and breast-bone, leaving an empty space.
Pass the fillets and half a pound of cooked chicken twice through a mincing machine. Pound them in a mortar with a quarter of a pint of cream, the anchovy essence, foie-gras and seasoning. Rub through a wire sieve. Whisk the remaining quarter of a pint of cream with quarter of a pint of aspic-jelly and stir them lightly to the other ingredients, add the chopped truffle and fill the chicken with this mixture. Shape as smartly as possible and coat with Chaudfroid sauce. Decorate with truffle and pour over a thin layer of aspic jelly. Rest the chicken on the socle of rice and put cutlet frills on to the legs. Whisk the remainder of the aspic jelly, and when it is white and just going to set, pile it roughly around the chicken. Sprinkle with chopped pistachio-nut and decorate with truffle.
This is an ingredient list from a professional's notebook rather than a set of instructions: the method is assumed, as it would have been by any cook trained in cold larder work. What follows is what the list is actually asking for, and where the modern reader will trip.
- The method is missingThe book gives quantities only. The work implied is: poach or roast the chicken and cool it completely, lift the breast meat, pound and sieve it with the cold cooked chicken, foie gras, anchovy essence and truffle, fold in half-whipped cream and cool melted aspic, refill the breast to its original shape, chill until firm, mask with chaudfroid, glaze with aspic and set the bird on the rice socle.
- Gill and pintThese are imperial measures. A gill is 5 fl oz, and a pint is 20 fl oz, so the half pint of cream is 10 fl oz and the pint of chaudfroid a shade under 2 1/2 US cups. Using US pints throughout will leave you short of sauce.
- Chaudfroid sauceA white velouté or béchamel enriched with cream and set with dissolved aspic, cooled to the point where it just coats the back of a spoon. If it is too warm it runs off the bird; too cool and it sets in ropes. The window is narrow and the sauce is usually stirred over ice to catch it.
- Socle of riceA socle is a plinth, not a side dish. Rice was boiled to a stiff paste, pressed into an oval mould, chilled hard and used as a display base to raise the bird on the dish. It was rarely eaten, and modern service is better off with a plain chilled platter.
- "Half terrain Foie Gras"Most likely a compositor's mangling of terrine: half a terrine of foie gras. Tin and terrine sizes varied, so treat the quantity as approximate. Any smooth foie gras mousse or parfait works; whole seared lobes will not sieve into the mixture.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, salty commercial extract still sold in Britain. Anchovy paste let down with a little water is the closest substitute, and half a teaspoon is a seasoning, not a flavour you should be able to name in the finished mousse.
- TruffleA single black truffle chopped through the forcemeat was standard garnish in this style, and the price now makes it optional. Preserved truffle peelings give the specks without the outlay; truffle oil does not behave the same way in a cold mousse.
- Handling and yieldEverything here is assembled cold and served cold, with several hours of glazing and setting in between. Keep the bird refrigerated between coats rather than leaving it out on the bench, and serve it the day it is made. A whole chicken dressed this way serves six to eight as a buffet centrepiece.
- Filed under FishIf the entry does sit under a fish heading, that looks like a slip: nothing in the dish is fish beyond the half teaspoon of anchovy essence.
Chaudfroid — literally "hot-cold", a dish cooked hot and served cold under its own set sauce — is generally traced to eighteenth-century French service, and the story attaching it to a Marshal de Luxembourg called away from his table is traditional rather than documented. What is certain is the vogue that produced this page: by the end of the nineteenth century the cold buffet was the showpiece of the grand hotel and the large private house, and cooks competed at masking birds in white sauce, glazing them with aspic and mounting them on socles of rice, semolina, tallow or wax. The technique here — breast meat lifted, pounded with cream and foie gras, and rebuilt into the shape of the bird — is classic mousse work of the Escoffier generation, written for a reader who needed only the proportions. The name is the least legible part of the entry; "à la Navar" does not correspond to any standard garnish of the repertoire, and may be a house name or a slip for Navarraise.