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Entrées: Chipolata
Abatis de dinde à la Chipolata are the giblets stewed and served with Chipolata garnish.
PIGEONS.
Fillets of Pigeons are served as- Filets de pigeons à la Duxelle-coated with Duxelle sauce, breadcrumbed and fried; served with Provençale sauce and mushrooms. à la Parisienne-spread with forcemeat, breadcrumbed and fried; dressed on fried croûtons of bread, with a brown purée of cucumbers in the centre. Served with brown sauce and a Macedoine garnish, they are called à la Duchesse. à la Moderne--coated with liver forcemeat, breadcrumbed and fried; served with tomato sauce and dressed spinach.
Three of the four entries here are the same dish. Pigeon fillets are coated, crumbed and fried in every case, and only the coating and the sauce change, which is what earns each one a separate French name.
- Fillets of pigeon means the breastsTwo small birds give four fillets, which is one modest portion. Woodpigeon breasts are sold ready-trimmed and are cheap; they are also very lean, and the crumb coating in these recipes is the only thing standing between them and dryness.
- Duxelle is chopped mushroomA duxelle is mushrooms and shallots chopped fine and cooked dry, and it is used here as a paste to hold the breadcrumbs on. That technique still works on anything you want to crumb without flour and egg.
- Duchesse is not potato hereThe page says that the à la Parisienne fillets, served with brown sauce and a Macédoine garnish, become à la Duchesse. A modern reader who sees Duchesse and expects piped potato has been misled by a name that, in this book, moves with the garnish rather than the ingredient.
- Chipolata is never definedThe name appears in the title and in the first line, and the page tells you nothing about what the garnish contained. It is worth knowing that the modern British meaning, a thin breakfast sausage, is not what was being promised; the card was naming a composed garnish that the kitchen already had a formula for.
- Giblets as a course of their ownAbatis de dinde opens the page: turkey giblets stewed and served as an entrée, with a dressed garnish, in the middle of a formal dinner. Nothing in a modern menu occupies that position, and the nearest thing on a restaurant list today would be a plate of offal served as a starter.
- Brown purée of cucumbersCooked cucumber, reduced to a purée and browned, sat in the centre of a ring of fried pigeon. It is one of the genuinely vanished preparations in this book, and it is also easy: cucumber collapses fast in butter and tastes nothing like the raw vegetable.
This page shows the arithmetic behind a long dinner card. A kitchen with a fixed set of sauces and garnishes, Provençale, Soubise, tomato, Macédoine, Chipolata, could take one cheap bird and generate four named dishes from it, and the card would look as though four different things had been attempted. The names themselves are commercial: Parisienne, Moderne, Duchesse and Reine were chosen for how they read to a guest, not for anything they describe, and the book’s habit of defining them in half a line is an admission that the reader needed a key. It also tells you that pigeon was ordinary enough to be bought in quantity and worth boning out for fillets, which is the opposite of how it is treated now.