Two Truffles
Seasoning. Cardinal Sauce.
Trim off the skin and remove the bone of the salmon. Pound it in a mortar until quite fine.
Add gradually the reduced Béchamel sauce and the white of egg. Season with pepper, salt, and a pinch of cayenne or Nepaul pepper. through a fine wire or hair sieve, and keep cool until wanted.
Put Butter a number of small dariole or timbale moulds, decorate the top of each with fancifully cut slices of truffles, sprinkle all over the inside with finely-chopped lobster coral. Fill them with the salmon forcemeat, steam for twenty-five minutes, dish up on a hot dish, and serve with sauce cardinal.
This is a salmon mousseline steamed in small moulds — darioles or timbales — and sent out with a lobster-based sauce cardinal. The technique survives unchanged in classical kitchens; only the vocabulary and the equipment need translating.
- The hinge: keep everything coldA pounded fish forcemeat holds together because cold protein binds cold fat and liquid. Chill the salmon, the reduced Béchamel and the bowl, and work quickly. If the mixture warms and looks grainy or greasy it will weep in the mould and no amount of steaming will recover it.
- Mortar or processorPounding in a mortar can be replaced by a food processor, but pulse rather than run it, and stop as soon as the paste is smooth. The instruction to pass the pounded mixture through a fine wire or hair sieve is not optional finesse — it removes sinew and any missed bone, and it is what gives the finished timbale its texture. A drum sieve or a fine tamis works; press with a plastic scraper.
- Reduced BéchamelA stiff, well-cooked white sauce, reduced until it mounds on the spoon and then cooled. Modern proportions run roughly 1 lb salmon flesh to 4-5 oz reduced Béchamel and one egg white; the original quantities are not given here, so work by feel and test a spoonful in simmering water before filling the moulds.
- Nepaul pepperNepaul (Nepal) pepper was a mild dried chilli powder sold in Victorian grocers, close in character to a gentle cayenne. Ordinary cayenne, used sparingly, is the substitute.
- Lobster coralThe dark green roe of a hen lobster, which turns brilliant red on cooking. Cook it briefly, dry it, and chop or sieve it fine. Uncooked lobsters are increasingly hard to buy; if coral is unavailable, a lining of very finely chopped cooked lobster meat or a dusting of paprika-tinted crumb gives the colour without the flavour.
- Moulds and steamingDariole moulds are small straight-sided metal cups of about 2-3 fl oz; ramekins or muffin tins serve. Butter them well, line with the decoration, fill to within a few millimetres of the rim and cover with buttered paper. Twenty-five minutes of gentle steaming suits a full-size dariole; small ramekins may be done in fifteen to eighteen. They are ready when just firm to the fingertip and reading about 145F at the centre. Steam kept at a bare tremble, not a rolling boil, or the forcemeat puffs and turns spongy.
- Sauce cardinalA fish velouté or Béchamel finished with lobster butter and a little truffle essence, named for its cardinal-red colour. It should coat rather than pool; make it while the timbales steam and keep it warm without boiling, as lobster butter separates.
- YieldNo quantities are given in the original, and the recipe says only 'a number' of moulds, so the count depends entirely on how much forcemeat is made; either way this is a fish course, not a main dish. Turn them out onto a hot dish and sauce round the base rather than over the truffle decoration.
Timbales and darioles of fish forcemeat were a fixture of the late nineteenth-century fish course, when a competent kitchen was judged partly on whether its mousselines came out light. The method belongs to the French repertoire codified in the great professional manuals of the period, and its two decorative touches here ☁4 truffle cut into shapes and lobster coral for colour — are broadly in keeping with what is often described as Escoffier-era practice, where a pale forcemeat was expected to carry a design visible only when the mould was turned out. The sauce's name is conventionally explained by the red of a cardinal's robes. Salmon was the natural choice for such treatment in Britain, prized and costly, and its firm pale-pink flesh takes the pounding and sieving better than most.