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Entrées: Cardinal
Sauté de filets de volaille à la Cardinal is composed of sauté fillets arranged in a circle with alternate slices of truffle; Cardinal sauce in the centre.
Poulet à la Princesse is a cold entrée prepared with fillets of chickens cut in oval slices, coated with a sauce of aspic and cream, set in aspic and cut out; served on an aspic border, with salad.
Salade de volaille à la Brunow. Small round slices of fowl and slices of cucumber, stewed with white sauce, aspic, and peas; cut in square pieces when cold, and dressed on a salad border, with Tartare sauce.
Blanc, or Blanquette, de volaille aux concombres.
Slices from the breast of a roast fowl, with pieces of cucumber, white sauce, cream, etc.
Côtelettes de volaille à la Dauphine are made with the legs of fowls from which the thigh-bone has been removed. They are dipped in Allemande sauce, breadcrumbed and fried; served with a dressed vegetable in the centre, and white sauce.
Five chicken dishes, three of them cold and set in aspic. The page is shelved under Entrées, and that word is the first thing a modern reader has to unlearn.
- An entrée is not the main courseIn the structure this book serves, an entrée is a made dish of moderate size that arrives between the fish and the substantial joint. It is the course of constructed things: slices arranged in a ring, cutlets, things in aspic. The American use of the word for the largest plate of the evening is the exact opposite of what is meant on this page.
- The book names the sauce but will not tell you itCardinal sauce is called for and never described. Nor is Allemande, nor Tartare. This is deliberate: the volume is for whoever writes the menu, and it assumes a kitchen that already knows. It means you cannot cook from this page alone, only order from it.
- Aspic is doing the structural workA cold entrée coated in aspic and cream, cut out, and served on an aspic border is three separate jellies in one dish. Aspic here is clarified stock set with its own gelatine from bones and feet, which carries flavour. Powdered gelatine stirred into stock gives the set without the body, and that substitution is why reconstructed versions of these dishes taste thin.
- Côtelettes de volaille à la DauphineChicken legs with the thigh bone taken out and the drumstick bone left as a handle, so a piece of leg meat reads as a cutlet. The deception is the dish. Boned thighs are on every counter now and the technique transfers directly; what has gone is the wish to make one thing look like another.
- Truffle in slices, not shavingsAlternate slices of truffle between the chicken fillets: the truffle is cut thick enough to hold a shape and used for the black-against-white pattern as much as for its smell. Truffle oil and a shaver serve a different purpose and will not give you this.
- Cold food was the harder trickThree of the five dishes are served cold, from a larder rather than a refrigerator, which meant setting jellies in a room that was merely cool and keeping them there through a long dinner. The cold entrée was a display of control over temperature that a refrigerator has made invisible.
A page of small arranged constructions only makes sense in a dinner where courses arrive one at a time, carved and plated out of the diners’ sight and handed round by servants. Once the kitchen is no longer putting whole joints on the table for the host to deal with, it is free to build: to set a fillet in jelly, cut it out, and stand it on a border. That shift is visible in the shape of this book, which is organised as a sequence of separate courses rather than as a table plan. Behind the page, then, is a staffed kitchen and a service of dishes brought in from elsewhere, and a hostess whose contribution was the order of the courses and the words on the card.