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Entrées: Czarina
Côtelettes de pigeons à la Czarina are fillets ENTRÉES. breadcrumbed and fried, and a small piece of bone stuck in each to imitate cutlet bones; served with Czarina sauce. This dish may be served à l'Italienne with Italian sauce, or with any vegetable garnish.
Côtelettes de pigeons à la Mazarine are pigeons cut in halves, spread with forcemeat, breadcrumbed and fried; served with tomato sauce. They are also cut in halves and boned, with the exception of the leg bones, stuffed, breadcrumbed and broiled, and served as Côtelettes de pigeons à la Financière, with a Financière garnish.
Compote de pigeons à l'Algérienne are pigeons cut up, stewed, and served with a savoury brown sauce and pickled plums.
Chaudfroid de pigeons à la Castillane is made of pigeons, boned, stuffed with forcemeat, and braised; cut in slices, masked with brown game sauce, and served cold with a compote of dried cherries, garnished with aspic.
GAME.
VENISON.
Hachis de venaison is hashed venison.
Venison Cutlets, sauté and dressed in a crown, are served as- Côtelettes de venaison aux olives with brown sauce and olives; aux champignons - with mushrooms.
Pigeon dressed to look like something else, and then four lines on venison. One trick runs through the page, and it is worth understanding before any of the entries make sense.
- The false cutlet boneCôtelettes de pigeons are not cutlets. They are breast fillets, crumbed and fried, with a short piece of bone pushed into each so that it reads as a cutlet on the plate. The card promised côtelettes, so the kitchen produced something côtelette-shaped.
- Pigeon then and nowThese birds were cheap and everywhere. What a butcher sells today as squab is a young farmed pigeon: tender, dark, expensive, and ruined by long cooking. Wood pigeon breast is closer in flavour and much cheaper, and either wants to come off the heat rare.
- Chaudfroid explainedA chaudfroid is a cold dish wearing a hot-made sauce. The sauce is enriched, strengthened with gelatine, cooled to the point of setting, then poured over the cold cooked meat where it sets as a smooth coat. The aspic round the dish is the same gelatine, left clear.
- Sour fruit against dark meatPickled plums with the stewed pigeons, dried cherries with the chaudfroid, olives with the venison cutlets. Sharp preserved fruit beside dark meat is the one idea on this page that transfers whole and unaltered to a modern plate.
- “Dressed in a crown”The cutlets stood leaning against one another in a ring with the garnish in the middle. It is a serving shape, not a cooking method, and it appears on nearly every page of this book. On a modern plate the same food would be laid down in a line.
Read the names: Czarina, Mazarine, Castillane, Algérienne, Financière. Not one of them tells a cook what is in the dish or what to do with it. That is the problem the book was written to solve. A hostess chose names for a card, a cook had to send up food that matched them, and between the two there had to be a dictionary. The entry that reads Hachis de venaison is hashed venison shows the book at its plainest: the French is the whole point, and the English is the answer key.