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Salt and Pepper (Cro ton of fried Bread)
A croûton of fried Bread.
A small quantity of mashed Potatoes.
Roast one of the partridges, bone the other, and pound the meat (freed from sinews and skin) till smooth; add the raw egg, panada, and velouté sauce; season to taste, and rub through a wire sieve. This is the farce.
Bone the cooked partridge when cold, and cut into thin slices.
Stamp out some rounds for garnish, and eight to ten pieces in cutlet shapes.
Stamp out some little rounds of white of egg (hard-boiled), of truffle, and of mushroom. Butter eight to ten cutlet moulds; decorate them with these little rounds; put them on the ice to set.
Work up the farce, and put a thin layer in each mould; lay a thin slice of cooked partridge on the top, and fill up with the farce; smooth it over with a wet knife (press down well); put them in a sauté-pan containing a little hot water; cover with a buttered paper, and cook in a moderately heated oven for twenty minutes.
Heat up the financière ragoût in the Madère sauce; add the remaining mushrooms and truffles, left whole or cut in dice, and simmer for a few minutes. Fix the croûte of fried bread in the centre of a hot dish, around which put a thin border of mashed potatoes. Turn out the cutlets, dress them neatly on the border of mashed potatoes. Arrange the financière as a garnish artistically on the croûte; pour the sauce round, sprinkle with a little dissolved meat glaze, and serve.
Crépinettes de Lapin (ou Veau) au Beurre de Concombres. (Crépinettes of Rabbit or Veal with Cucumber (Cream) Sauce.
Ingredients.
About twelve ounces cold Rabbit (or Veal).
Four ounces of Bacon or Ham.
Two ounces of Butter.
This is a page of late-Victorian restaurant cookery: a partridge mousseline set in decorated cutlet moulds, poached in a water bath, and dressed round a fried-bread pedestal. The text assumes you already have the book's foundation recipes to hand, and the printed ingredient list has run into the next recipe, so quantities must be read out of the method.
- The hinge: keep the farce coldA mousseline farce of pounded raw game, egg and panada bound with velouté will break if it warms up. Work it over ice, chill the lined moulds until the decoration is set firm, and fill them straight from the refrigerator.
- PanadaA thick paste of bread or flour cooked in milk or stock, used as a binder. The recipe gives no quantity; classical proportions vary, commonly somewhere between a quarter and a third the weight of the meat. Too much makes the cutlets pasty, too little and they crumble on turning out.
- Velouté and Madère sauceVelouté and Madère sauce -- Velouté is a white stock sauce thickened with blond roux; Madère is a brown sauce finished with Madeira. The recipe assumes both are already made, presumably from foundation recipes given elsewhere in the book, so both need to be prepared before you start.
- Financière ragoutA classic garnish of cockscombs and kidneys, truffle, mushroom and quenelles in Madeira sauce. Cockscombs are effectively unobtainable; a mixture of quenelles, whole button mushrooms and sliced truffle in the Madère sauce gives the same effect on the plate.