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Vegetables, or Légumes, and Salads. 149
Petites gelées aux champignons are little mushroom jellies, served with a garnish of aspic and salad.
ONIONS.
Stewed Portugal onions are served as Oignons au jus.
Stewed in a white sauce with purée of ham, they are en ragoût.
For Oignons farcis the centres are cut out, they are stuffed, and braised.
Small onions served in Poulette sauce are à la. poulette.
Au sirop doré they are stewed with butter, sugar, etc., and are served in the sauce.
A purée of onions with stock is called Puréed'oignons à la Bretonne. It is garnished with croûtons.
PARSNIPS.
Panais à la Hamelin are dressed in a purée with a rich white sauce, covered with green peas.
PEAS.
Mushroom jellies, six onions and a parsnip. A vegetable chapter from a kitchen working out of a root cellar.
- Savoury jelly, in small mouldsPetites gelées aux champignons are mushroom jellies turned out and served with aspic and salad. Cold savoury jelly was a whole genre and it has gone almost completely from home cooking. These had to stand unsupported on a dish, so they were set much firmer than anything a modern cook would make.
- Au sirop doréOnions stewed with butter and sugar and served in the resulting syrup. It is a caramelised onion reached by a different road — wetter, sweeter, and finished in minutes rather than the slow dry browning a modern recipe asks for.
- Stuffed onions need a parboil“The centres are cut out, they are stuffed, and braised” skips the step that makes it work. A raw onion shell will not soften in the time the filling takes; blanch the hollowed onions first and the braise comes out even.
- À la Bretonne is not one thingHere it is attached to a purée of onions with stock. Elsewhere in French cookery the same word means a dish built around haricot beans. The naming system looks like a rule and behaves like a habit, which is worth remembering before you try to read an old menu by logic alone.
- Panais à la Hamelin is about colourA purée of parsnip in a rich white sauce, covered over with green peas. Pale beneath, bright green on top, on a white dish. The construction is visual; the two flavours have little to say to each other.
- A vegetable course meant the vegetable was the dishWhole Portugal onions stewed and served in their own liquor arrived on their own plate, in their own course, with nothing to compete with. That is the difference between this book and a modern plate, where the same onion would be a garnish.
Six onion dishes and a parsnip is a picture of the year. From October to April a kitchen in this country was working from what the garden had stored — roots, onions, dried things — and the French naming was the means by which five vegetables became forty dishes across a winter of dinners. A stuffed onion, an onion purée, onions in Poulette sauce and onions in syrup are four entries on the menu card and one sack in the cellar.