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Spice, Pepper and Salt
A few Truffles.
Braise the carcass of a pheasant; remove the meat, of which you require half a pound; put it in a mortar freed from bone and skin, and pound well; add the Espagnole sauce, the sherry, foiegras, panada, egg, sausage meat, and breadcrumbs. Season with pepper, salt, and a little aromatic spice, and pass all through a very fine sieve.
Some chopped truffles may be introduced after the farce is passed through the sieve. Fill up a greased border mould with the farce, and cook in the usual way.
This is a forcemeat (farce) for a moulded pheasant border, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: the ingredient quantities live in the surrounding pages, and the method assumes you already know how a border mould is cooked. The points below fill in what the original takes for granted.
- The hinge: cook it in a water bath"Cook in the usual way" is shorthand the book leaves to the surrounding pages; for a farce of this kind it almost certainly means the filled mould stood in a tin of hot water and baked in a moderate oven until the farce is just set and springs back to a finger. No temperature or timing is given in the recipe, so judge it by the set. Direct oven heat risks curdling the egg and forcing the fat out, and the border can collapse when it is turned out.
- Quantities are not givenOn this page only the half pound of pheasant meat is specified; the definite articles ("the Espagnole sauce, the sherry") point to amounts given elsewhere in the book. Any ratio of panada, fat forcemeat, egg and sherry used here is a modern guess rather than something the text supplies, so add the wet elements sparingly: too much and the mixture will not hold.
- PanadaA thick paste of bread or flour cooked in milk or stock and beaten smooth, used as a binder. It must be completely cold before it goes into the mortar or the fat will melt and separate.
- Espagnole sauceThe old brown mother sauce, made from brown roux, veal stock and mirepoix and reduced for hours. A well-reduced brown stock or demi-glace stands in for it here, but use it sparingly and cold.
- Aromatic spiceThe book's "aromatic spice" is a house mix along the lines of quatre epices: pepper, nutmeg, clove and ginger or cinnamon. A quarter teaspoon per pound of farce is plenty; the point is warmth behind the game, not a spiced flavour.
- Mortar and sieveThe pounding and the fine sieve the recipe calls for existed to get an absolutely smooth, homogeneous paste. A food processor does the pounding in seconds, but keep everything cold and still push the mixture through a fine sieve afterwards to catch sinew and shot. Add the chopped truffle after sieving, as directed, or it disappears.
- Sausage meatHere it is the fat element. Use plain coarse pork sausage meat with no sage, rusk or heavy seasoning, or buy fat pork belly and mince it; a modern seasoned sausage will overwhelm the pheasant.
- Doneness and yieldA farce bound with egg, foie gras and pounded game is safest taken to 165F at the centre. The recipe gives no mould size or number of servings; half a pound of meat plus its binders makes a modest ring, intended as the frame for a ragout or salpicon spooned into the centre.
Border moulds like this belong to the high Victorian and Edwardian service that Escoffier's generation inherited from Careme: a ring of savoury farce baked in a bain-marie, turned out on a hot dish, and its hollow centre filled with a garnish of game, mushrooms or sweetbreads in sauce. There is economy in it, since the recipe begins by braising the carcass of the bird and reclaiming half a pound of meat from it, though the recipe does not say what became of the breast and legs. Espagnole, panada and a fine sieve were standing equipment in such kitchens, which is why the book names them without explanation, and the foie gras and truffles mark this as a dish for a household with a professional cook.