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Spinach Purée
Half a pound of raw or cooked Rabbit meat.
Quarter of a pound of Beef Tongue cut into strips.
Four preserved Mushrooms, diced.
A mirepoix (consisting of Bacon, Onion, Carrot, Bouquet Garni, etc.).
One gill of Tomato Sauce.
Seasoning. Panurette. Pick, singe, and bone the pheasant in the same manner that a fowl is boned for galantine. Prepare a nice farce by pounding the rabbit-meat, the ham, and chicken's livers; when fine, add the yolks of eggs (these may be hard-boiled if liked), and white sauce or cream sufficient to form the necessary consistency of the farce. Season with pepper, salt, and aromatic spice. Mix well, and rub through a wire sieve; put it into a basin, H. 2 and work in the mushrooms and truffle. Lay out the boned pheasant on to a board skin downwards, spread the forcemeat evenly on the meat, put the strips of tongue evenly divided on the farce, etc., roll up carefully, cover with greased paper, and tie in muslin.
Chop the carcase of the bird rather coarsely, and put it in a sauté-pan with the butter and the mirepoix; fry it a little over a quick fire, and stir a few minutes longer to blend the whole. Lay the stuffed pheasant on this; allow the surface to take colour; moisten with the stock and wine; cover with buttered paper, and let it braise gently in a moderate oven for about an hour. When done, untie, glaze over the top with meat glaze, and keep hot. Remove the fat from the mirepoix and liquor, add the tomato sauce, boil for a few minutes, then strain, and reduce to a nice consistency.
Butter a border mould, sprinkle with panurette, and fill up with potato purée, enriched with one or two yolks of eggs; bake in a hot oven for ten minutes or so, and turn out on a hot dish. Have ready and hot the spinach purée, well seasoned and richly flavoured. Cut the pheasant into slices about a quarter of an inch thick, arrange these neatly on the prepared border, dress the spinach in the centre. Sauce over the slices with a little of the tomato sauce, and serve the remainder in a sauce-boat.
The heading and the ingredient list have come apart from the method here: what follows is a braised stuffed pheasant (a ballotine) set on a piped potato border with spinach purée in the middle, and the printed list covers only part of what the instructions call for. Read it as a working plan rather than a complete shopping list.
- The missing ingredientsThe method calls for ham, chicken livers, egg yolks, truffle, butter, stock, wine, potato purée and spinach purée, none of which appear in the list above, and the pheasant itself is unquantified. Work backwards from the farce: 8 oz rabbit meat, about 4 oz ham and 3-4 chicken livers with 2 yolks and a few spoonfuls of cream will comfortably stuff one bird.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, about 140 ml (the American gill is 4 fl oz). Tomato sauce in a book of this class means a cooked, reduced sauce, not passata from a jar.
- PanuretteFine dried breadcrumbs, sieved, used to line the buttered border mould so the potato turns out cleanly. Dried white breadcrumbs or fine panko work; the point is a dry coating, not a crust.
- Oven temperaturesA moderate oven for the braise is 325-350F. The hot oven for the potato border is 425-450F, and ten minutes there is only to set and colour the surface.
- The mirepoix is a braising bedHere it is chopped bacon, onion, carrot and bouquet garni fried with the coarsely chopped carcase, and the rolled bird sits directly on it. It is structure and flavour for the sauce, not a garnish, and it gets strained out.
- Boning the birdBoning a pheasant through the back, skin left whole, is the one piece of real technique in the recipe. A butcher will do it on request. Keep the skin intact where you can, since it holds the roll together under the muslin.
- Cook to temperature, not to the hourAn hour in a moderate oven is about right for a roll of this size, but pheasant is very lean and the farce contains liver and egg. Check the centre of the roll at 160-165F and take it out; past that the farce dries and the slices crumble when you cut them.
- Rest before slicingUntie, glaze, and let the roll settle 10-15 minutes before cutting the quarter-inch slices. Cut hot from the muslin and the forcemeat spreads.
- YieldOne pheasant stuffed this way, sliced onto a border, serves six as an entrée in the old sense of the word — a middle course — or four as a main.
This is Victorian and Edwardian service kitchen writing at full stretch: a boned bird, a pounded and sieved farce, a piped or moulded potato border, a purée in the well and a reduced sauce both over and beside. By the modern convention, a galantine is the cold version, pressed and jellied, while rolled, braised and sent hot in slices it is usually called a ballotine, and this recipe sits squarely in that tradition. The writing assumes a reader who already knows how to bone a fowl, hold a farce together and reduce a sauce — which is why the instructions are dense and the quantities casual. The page itself is in a garbled state, with a spinach purée heading over a pheasant recipe and half the ingredients absent from the list, though the cause of the dislocation cannot be determined.