Boudins
Chop cold cooked meat very fine, and to every pint allow 1 tablespoonful of butter, 1/2 of a cupful of cream or milk, the whites of 3 eggs, 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley, salt and pepper to taste. Melt the butter and pour it over the meat; add cream or milk and the seasonings, then pound it well with a potato masher and add the well-beaten whites. Fill custard cups twothirds full of the mixture, stand in a baking-pan half filled with boiling water, and bake in a moderate oven for twenty minutes. When done turn them out carefully upon a heated dish and pour round them a sauce.
Cecils from Cold Meat To every pint of cold chopped meat allow the yolks of 2 eggs, 2 tablespoonfuls of butter, 1 tablespoonful of bread crumbs, 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley, salt and pepper to taste. Mix all the ingredients together and stir over the fire in a saucepan until heated through. When cold form into small round balls, dip in egg and bread crumbs and fry in smoking hot fat.
Two ways to rework yesterday's roast: a baked meat custard set in a water bath, and fried rissoles. Both assume you already have cold cooked meat on hand, and both live or die on how finely it is reduced.
- A pint of meatChopped meat is measured by volume here, not weight. A pint of finely chopped cooked beef, veal, lamb or chicken is roughly 1 lb, or the yield of a modest Sunday roast.
- Moderate ovenSomewhere around 325-350F. The boudins are set custards, and much above that the egg white will curdle and weep water into the cups.
- Pound it wellThis is the hinge. The masher work emulsifies the butter and cream into the meat so the boudin slices cleanly rather than crumbling. A food processor does it in thirty seconds; pulse to a smooth paste before folding in the beaten whites.
- The water bathBoiling water halfway up the cups, as written. Standard 6 oz ramekins work; the pint mixture fills four to six two-thirds full. Twenty minutes is right for that size, and they are done when the centre is just firm to a fingertip.
- UnmouldingLet them stand two or three minutes off the heat before turning out, and run a thin knife round the rim. Straight from the oven they are fragile.
- "A sauce"The book assumes you have one to hand. A brown gravy, a velouté made from the roast's own stock, tomato sauce or a mushroom sauce all suit; the boudins themselves are mild and need the seasoning around them.
- Cecils: smoking hot fatFrying fat that is actually smoking is past its useful point and will taste of it. 365-375F browns the crumbed balls in two to three minutes, which is all they need since the meat is already cooked.
- Cecils: chill before shapingThe recipe says to cool the mixture, and it means it. Warm forcemeat will not hold a ball and the coating will slide off in the fat. An hour in the refrigerator makes them easy to roll.
- Reheated meatBoth dishes take meat that has already been cooked and cooled. Get it properly hot through in the second cooking rather than merely warm, and do not hold the mixture at room temperature while you work.
Boudin in French covers a family of sausages, but by the late nineteenth century Anglo-American cookbooks had borrowed the word for a soft, pale forcemeat bound with egg white and cream and poached or baked in moulds — closer to a boudin blanc in texture than to anything in a casing. Cecils is the older and stranger word: it appears in English cookery writing for small fried balls of seasoned minced meat, and its origin is generally described as unknown, with the usual guesses at a personal name being traditional rather than documented. What both recipes really record is the economy of a household that roasted large joints. Cold meat was a daily fact, and a cookbook earned its keep by turning it into something that read as a made dish rather than a plate of leftovers — hence the water bath, the ramekins, and the sauce poured round.