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Galantine De Poularde
Make in the same ways as boned turkey. "Her lovely name is Blanche. The veil of the maiden is white; the wreath of roses which she wears is white. I determined that my dinner should be as spotless as the snow, as white as her own tint--and confectioned with the most fragrant cream and almonds."
Mirobolant.--Pendennis.
The entry is a cross-reference rather than a full method: a galantine of chicken is built exactly like the boned turkey earlier in the book, only smaller. What follows is what the shorthand assumes you already know.
- What a poularde isA poularde is a fattened young hen, spayed or simply penned and fed for tenderness, and it is not sold under that name in most markets. A 4-5 lb roasting chicken stands in for it directly.
- Galantine means boned and rolledThe bird is boned out whole (usually through the back), skin left in one sheet, spread with forcemeat, rolled into a cylinder and poached, then served cold. Nothing about it is baked. It is conventionally distinguished from a ballotine, which is generally served hot, though the two names have often been used interchangeably.
- The hinge: keep the skin intactWork with the knife blade against the bone, not the skin, and take the wing and leg bones out from inside. A torn skin will split during poaching and the forcemeat will escape into the stock.
- Rolling and tyingRoll the stuffed bird in a double thickness of scalded cheesecloth or a linen napkin, twist the ends like a cracker and tie them, then tie the length at intervals. This is what gives the finished galantine its even round section.
- Poach, do not boilCook it submerged in well-flavoured chicken or veal stock held at a bare shiver, around 175F. Hard boiling swells and bursts the forcemeat. Allow roughly 20 minutes per pound of the stuffed roll, and take it to 165F at the centre on an instant-read thermometer.
- Press it while it coolsLift the roll out still in its cloth, retie the ends tightly, lay it on a tray and set a board with a few pounds of weight on top. Chill under weight overnight; this compacts the forcemeat so it slices cleanly instead of crumbling.
- The stock becomes the glazeReduce the poaching liquid, clarify it and use it as aspic to coat the chilled galantine. A stock made with the carcass and a split calf's foot or a couple of pig's trotters will set on its own; otherwise gelatine is needed.
- Serving and yieldA 4-5 lb bird with forcemeat gives roughly 10 to 12 buffet servings. Serve cold, cut in thin rounds, and keep it refrigerated until the moment it goes out, since it is a cooked poultry product held cold for hours.
The quotation is not culinary advice but Thackeray: Alcide Mirobolant, the extravagant French chef in Pendennis (serialised 1848-50), explaining the all-white dinner he composed in honour of Blanche Amory. Mirobolant became a stock nineteenth-century allusion for high French kitchen romance, and quoting him over a galantine invokes that association. The dish itself is older than the joke: galantine is generally traced to Old French forms related to gelatine, and the technique of boning a bird, reshaping it around a forcemeat and setting it in its own jellied stock belongs to the medieval and early modern kitchen, where a whole-looking bird that sliced like a terrine was a display piece. By the late 1800s it had become standard cold-buffet work, made ahead, glazed with aspic and decorated with truffle and blanched vegetable cutouts.