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Entrées: Italienne
Émincé de dinde à l'Italienne are slices served with Italian sauce and gherkins.
Chartreuse de dinde is an ornamental mould of mixed vegetables, filled with minced turkey and white sauce.
Medaillons de dinde à la Financière are made with the legs of a turkey. They are boned, stuffed with forcemeat and braised; cut in slices, coated with a purée of chestnuts, and served with chestnut sauce or a Financière garnish.
This dish can also be made with slices of a galantine of fowl or turkey, and can be served cold with salad and aspic.
All three entries are made from a turkey that has already been cooked and carved. This is a page about the second and third appearance of a large bird, dressed up well enough that nobody at the table was expected to notice.
- Émincé means thinly sliced cooked meatNot minced and not raw. The first line is cold roast turkey sliced thin, warmed in a sauce, and given gherkins for sharpness; it is a leftovers dish with a French name, and it is the most directly usable thing here.
- The legs are the showpieceMédaillons de dinde are made from the legs: boned, stuffed, braised, sliced, and coated with chestnut purée. Today the breast is what gets the money and the legs are the cheap part, so this is the one page in the book whose economics have completely inverted in the cook’s favour.
- A chartreuse is a lined mouldThe ornamental mould of mixed vegetables filled with minced turkey is all labour and no expense: vegetables trimmed to uniform shapes and laid in a pattern against the wall of the mould before the filling goes in. A terrine or a timbale does the same job now, and the pattern is what has been abandoned.
- Chestnuts twice overA chestnut purée coating and a chestnut sauce, from a starting point of fresh nuts that had to be scored, roasted and peeled. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts turn this from an afternoon into twenty minutes, and they purée smoothly with stock and butter.
- Financière is a name, not a descriptionThe page offers the garnish as an alternative to the chestnut sauce and leaves it at that. Where the book does this, and it does it often, there is no recoverable recipe on the page; you have the name as it would appear on a card and nothing else.
- The cold version is the real oneThe last sentence is the useful one: the same thing can be made from slices of a galantine and served cold with salad and aspic. That was not a compromise. A cold dish could be finished the day before, which is why so much formal food of this kind was built to be eaten at room temperature.
A large bird roasted whole for a dinner could not be eaten at one sitting, and no household of this kind would have served the remains as remains. What this page records is the machinery for preventing that: the carcass went back to the kitchen and came out as slices in Italian sauce, as a moulded chartreuse, as medallions under chestnut purée, and finally as something cold in aspic. Each stage has its own French name, so each stage could appear on a card as a dish in its own right. The thrift is total and the vocabulary exists to conceal it, which is a fair summary of what this whole book was for.