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Salt and Pepper (Take six ounces of the white)
Take six ounces of the white meat of a pheasant, and pound it in a mortar with one gill of good white sauce, one ounce of butter, three eggs, and a little pepper and salt. When well mixed and pounded, rub this mixture through a hair-sieve, and stir in the tablespoonful of sherry and the gill of cream whipped. Butter some small moulds and decorate them with strips of tongue or of chillies; fill the mould with the pheasant mixture and steam steadily, not too fast, for twenty minutes. Pour some sauce, made from the bones and trimmings of the pheasant, round and serve very hot. The sauce must boil till quite clear.
This is a pheasant mousseline — pounded game breast lightened with egg and whipped cream, steamed in small moulds. The hinge is heat control: gentle, steady steam sets the custard silkily, while a hard boil curdles the eggs and weeps liquid.
- The gillA British gill is 5 imperial fluid ounces, about 150 ml or a generous half US cup. The recipe uses two: one of white sauce and one of cream, whipped before folding in.
- The missing list"The tablespoonful of sherry and the gill of cream" are referred to as though already introduced, so a line naming them seems to have dropped out of the text above. Take them as one tablespoon of sherry and a gill (about 150 ml) of cream, whipped to soft peaks.
- White sauceHere this means a thick velouté or béchamel, cooled until firm before pounding. Warm sauce will slacken the mixture and it will not hold the cream.
- Mortar and hair sieveA food processor does the pounding in under a minute; keep everything cold and do not let the machine warm the mixture. Pass it through a fine drum sieve or tamis afterwards — this step is what makes the difference between a mousseline and a meatloaf, and it cannot be skipped.
- MouldsSmall dariole or timbale moulds, buttered and lined with strips of tongue or chilli, about 100 ml each. Six ounces of breast plus the enrichments fills roughly six to eight, serving three or four as an entrée.
- SteamingTwenty minutes at a bare tremble is right. The mousselines are done at about 160-165F in the centre, just firm to a light press.
- The pheasant itselfUse skinned breast from a bird of 2-2.5 lb dressed weight; two breasts give roughly the six ounces called for. Wild birds may carry shot — check the flesh before it goes near a processor blade.
- "Boil till quite clear"The sauce is a game jus from the carcass and trimmings, reduced and skimmed steadily so the scum and fat come off and the liquid runs bright. Clear means clarified by skimming, not merely thickened.
Mousselines of this kind belong to the classical French repertoire that British cookery schools adopted wholesale in the late nineteenth century. The technique — pounded raw flesh, a panade or thick sauce, eggs, sieving, then whipped cream folded in and set gently in buttered moulds — is the same one used for quenelles de brochet, and it belonged to the entrée course served between fish and roast. Pheasant appears here because it was seasonal, and gave the cook both the delicate white breast for the moulds and the carcass for the sauce. The strips of tongue and chilli lining the moulds are pure Victorian table decoration: the mousseline is turned out to show a pattern through its pale surface, a detail that mattered in a period when a dish was judged as much by its appearance on the sideboard as by its taste.