Bordeaux
Bordelese. - The famous capital of the Gascon country has given its name to a sauce, to a method of serving the entrecôte or ribsteak, and to the cooking of crayfish.
Sauce Bordelaise. - Properly speaking, there is no such sauce, and very few of the books care to describe it. What is so called is a variety of the Genevese Sauce, and got its name probably because of the Bordeaux wine in it. Take a good brown sauce, Spanish if possible, boil it down with a tumblerful of red Bordeaux, with one or two shalots chopped small, and by rights also with a clove of garlic crushed.
Entrecôte à la Bordelaise. One would imagine that this must be a ribsteak with Bordelese sauce. It is nothing of the kind-for, as we have said, there is, strictly speaking, no such sauce. It is a ribsteak grilled in the ordinary way and served with (either upon it or under it) a piece of cold maître d'hôtel butter, into which has been wrought some chopped shalot. To those who love onion flavours the idea seems good, but many persons regret the order they have given for the Entrecôte à la Bordelaise, from not taking into account that the shalot is raw.
Bouchées 8I Crayfish à la Bordelaise are a passion with some people, especially in the season when game fails. They take the place of game towards the end of dinner. Chop a faggot of Mirepoix fine, pass it in butter, and add a tumblerful of white wine to it. Boil it up, put the crayfish into it alive; they are soon dead and red, although to be thoroughly cooked they must be tossed for at least twenty minutes. When done, pile them in a noble monument on the dish; take the sauce, finish it with a little fresh butter, and pour it fondly on the monument you have raised.
Given the crayfish, there comes a terrible question, - How are they to be got at? how are they to be eaten? Prigs and foolish virgins are aghast to find that knives and forks are of no use. Then comes a moment of great trial to weak nerves. What becomes of our boasted civilisation when it is known that the crayfish are to be boldly eaten with the fingers, and that when the dish is consumed finger-glasses go round?
BOTARGO-Roe of the Grey Mullet. are small Vol-au-vents, and the way to make them is described under that heading. They are filled with a salpicon of chicken, game or fish, well moistened with a white sauce - Béchamel or Allemande. Bouchées à la Reine. - Filled with a salpicon of chicken, -that is, a fine mince of chicken with tongue, mushrooms and truffles. The queen after whom they are named was Marie Lesczinska, the wife of Louis XV., who gave the French cooks their idea of the Baba or Polish cake and the Kromeski or Polish croquette.
Bouchées of game in the same way.
Bouchées of lobsters or of shrimps are filled with either of these cut small, but not mixed with anything else save the white sauce.
Bouillabaisse BOUILLABAISSE is a fish soup for which the Provençal fishing towns are famous-chiefly Marseilles. Garlic is essential to it, as to nearly all the Provençal cookery; but those who eschew garlic may still obtain from it a good idea of how to concoct a savoury fish soup. Thackeray's Ballad of Bouillabaisse has given it a great name in England, but most Englishmen find it disappointing. It is a soup to be mightily loved or to be abhorred.
This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is- A sort of soup or broth or brew Or hotch-potch of all sorts of fishes That Greenwich never could outdo:
Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffern, Soles, onions, garlic, roach and dace ; All these you eat at Terré's tavern In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.
Choose a variety of fish-soles, red mullets, dorys, whitings, flounders, perch-avoiding the oily sorts, as the herring and the eel. The mussels mentioned by Thackeray are a pleasant addition. Reckon from half to three quarters of a pound for each person to be served. For every pound of fish put a pint of water into a stewpan, a quarter of a pint of white wine, and a tablespoonful of oil. Then supposing there are four or five persons to be provided for-add two sliced onions, two cloves, two bayleaves, two leeks-the white only, but chopped, four cloves of garlic, a tablespoonful of chopped parsley, a little orange or lemon zest, half an ounce of chopped capsicums, a teaspoonful of saffron (but many tastes crave a whole tablespoonful), pepper and salt. Into this mix the fish, which have been well trimmed as well as cut into pieces, and boil them for half an hour. The Marseillese declare for rapid boiling on a brisk fire-pointing out that the name Bouillabaisse means Bouillon-abaissé-that is, broth rapidly reduced by evaporation. This rule, however, is not always followed. When the soup is to be served, drain Brains the fish and put them on a dish apart, making, spite of Thackeray, a pretty good clearance of herbs and spices. Strain the soup by itself into a tureen, with it may be sippets of toast in it. It is more common, but not so good, to serve soup and fish together.
Four separate preparations are bundled into this entry, and only the bouillabaisse is given anything like full measurements. The rest assume a professional kitchen with a stockpot of brown sauce already on the stove.
- A tumblerfulReckon it at somewhere between 8 and 10 fl oz; Victorian writers often took a tumbler as about half a pint. Kettner's uses the word loosely for a drinking glass rather than any fixed measure, so treat it as an approximation in both the sauce and the crayfish.
- "Spanish" sauceSauce espagnole: brown roux, brown stock, tomato and mirepoix, simmered and skimmed for hours. If you are not making it, a well-reduced brown veal stock thickened lightly will carry the wine and shallot better than a floury substitute.
- The marrow questionThe classic bordelaise of the later French repertoire includes poached beef marrow, and often a reduction of the wine with bay and peppercorns before the brown sauce goes in. Dallas records neither.
- Raw shallot in the butterThe entry's own warning is the useful part. Shallot worked raw into maître d'hôtel butter stays sharp and sulphurous under a hot steak; sweating it in butter first and cooling it gives the flavour without the bite.
- Mirepoix "faggot"Here it means the bundle of diced carrot, onion, celery and herbs, sweated in butter, not a tied bouquet garni. Chop small so it dissolves into the finished sauce.
- Twenty minutes is far too long for crayfishCrayfish are done when they turn red and the tails firm, roughly three to five minutes for small ones and no more than eight for large. Twenty minutes of tossing produces cottony tail meat. The instruction probably reflects a much larger pan and a much slower recovery to the boil than a domestic stove.
- Sourcing crayfishThe native European white-clawed crayfish is now protected across much of its range and cannot be taken; farmed or invasive signal crayfish are what is sold. Buy them alive and cook them the same day.
- Bouillabaisse quantitiesHalf to three-quarters of a pound of whole fish per person is about right once heads and frames are accounted for. The recipe scales its liquid by weight of fish -- one pint water, quarter-pint white wine and a tablespoon of oil per pound -- while the aromatics are given for four or five people.
- Saffron and capsicumsA teaspoon of saffron threads for four is already generous; the suggested tablespoon will be medicinal. "Capsicums" here probably means pepper or chilli pods rather than powder, though the entry does not say which or how hot, so half an ounce chopped could be anything from mild to sharp.
- The hinge: boil it hardThe rapid boil is not carelessness. It drives the olive oil into emulsion with the broth, which is what gives bouillabaisse its body and pale gold colour. Add firm-fleshed fish first and delicate fillets in the last few minutes so the emulsion has time to form without everything disintegrating.
- Stray headings"BOTARGO -- Roe of the Grey Mullet" and the opening of the Bouchées entry are running heads and fragments from adjoining columns of the original book, not part of any recipe here.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) was written anonymously by the journalist E. S. Dallas and named for Auguste Kettner, whose Soho restaurant was then a fixture of London dining; its alphabetical form lets it argue as much as it instructs, which is why the bordelaise entry opens by denying that the sauce exists. The scepticism has some ground: regional sauce names were still fluid in the mid-nineteenth century, and what a Paris kitchen sent out as bordelaise varied from house to house before the red wine, shallot and marrow version became the standard of the classic French repertoire. The attribution of bouchées à la reine to Marie Leszczyńska, queen to Louis XV, is traditional rather than documented, as is the Polish descent of the baba that usually travels with it. Thackeray's Ballad of Bouillabaisse, published in 1849 and quoted here at length, did more than any cookbook to make the soup known in England, and Dallas is honest that most English diners found the reality disappointing. His etymology, bouillon abaissé, is one gloss among several; the Provençal bolh-abaissa is often read instead as "boil, then lower" -- an instruction about the fire rather than a claim about evaporation.