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Six Mushrooms (Three ounces of cold Pheasant)
Three ounces of cold Pheasant.
One gill of Velouté Sauce.
One gill of Béchamel Sauce.
Salt, Pepper and grated Nutmeg.
Remove skin and sinews from the meat of the pheasant, cut it into small slices or mince coarsely, put it into a small stewpan, with the mushrooms and the truffle finely chopped, and sufficient velouté sauce to moisten, add a small piece of butter, and stir over the fire until hot. This forms the salpicon.
Rub some cooked potatoes through a fine sieve, mix them with a piece of butter and a little cream. Season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg; let this purée get thoroughly hot, and then add the yolk of an egg. Work it well until it forms a light paste.
Butter some small moulds, line them with the purée. Place about a dessertspoonful of the salpicon in the centre of each mould, cover with the potato purée, smooth the top with the blade of a knife, and bake in a moderate oven until of a golden brown colour. Warm up the Béchamel sauce, add the remaining velouté sauce and yolk of egg, stir well over the fire. When hot finish with a little cream, and add the remaining butter bit by bit.
T Turn out the little moulds into an entrée dish, pour this sauce round them, and serve hot.
P.S.-Instead of pheasant, any other kind of meat, chicken, duck, geese, etc., may be used up in this manner.
A late-Victorian way of using up a few ounces of cold game: a rich mince baked inside a shell of duchesse-style potato. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete — the mushrooms and truffle survive only in the title and the method, and the butter, cream and egg yolks are never quantified — so read the method first and assemble accordingly.
- What you actually needThree ounces cooked pheasant, six mushrooms (a figure that survives only in the title) and a truffle, and a gill each of veloute and bechamel. The rest is unquantified in the original: cooked floury potatoes, butter, two egg yolks (the method calls for one in the puree and one in the sauce) and a little cream. Split the butter between the salpicon, the potato and the finishing of the sauce.
- GillAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, so each sauce measure is a generous half cup. The recipe uses "sufficient veloute to moisten" the meat and the "remaining" veloute in the sauce, but does not say how the gill divides between the two.
- Moderate oven350F/180C. The moulds are only being heated through and browned on top — 15 to 20 minutes is enough. Longer and the potato dries and cracks.
- The hinge: the potato must be stiffSieve the potatoes while hot and dry them out over the heat before adding butter, cream and yolk. A wet purée will not hold the lining of the mould and the salpicon will burst out in the oven. It should be a paste you can spread with a knife, not something that pours.
- SalpiconThe standard term for a fine dice of meat and garnish bound with a little sauce. Bind it barely — just enough velouté to hold, as a slack filling soaks into the potato wall.
- Egg yolk in the sauceThe original directs you to stir it over the fire, but keep the sauce below a simmer once the yolk is in or it will curdle. The butter goes in last, bit by bit, which is what gives the gloss.
- MouldsSmall dariole moulds or timbales, about 3 fl oz each; buttered ramekins work. Butter heavily and chill briefly before filling so the shells turn out cleanly.
- YieldThe recipe does not say. Three ounces of meat with enough puree to line and cover would fill four to six small moulds — one or two per person as a light entree, not a main course.
This belongs to the *entrée* course of professional cookery of the period, where the object was to turn a few ounces of yesterday's roast into something that looked deliberate: a moulded case of duchesse potato, a bound mince inside, a velouté-and-béchamel sauce poured round rather than over. Both sauces are generally traced to Carême's white mother sauces as codified by Escoffier's generation — velouté built on a light stock, béchamel on milk — and combining them, then enriching with yolk, cream and butter off the heat, is textbook practice for the period. The postscript, offering chicken, duck or goose in place of pheasant, is the giveaway that this is a leftovers formula dressed in French; the truffle and the pheasant name it upward.