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Home › Recipes › Galantine of Goose or Duck
Galantine of Goose or Duck
For the filling of one large goose take: 2 ducks or fowls boiled tender. 12 ounces of white bread crumbs. 1 small onion. 4 hard-boiled eggs. 3 raw eggs. 1/2 cupful of melted goose fat. 1 cupful of meat jelly or aspic. 4 or 5 teaspoonfuls of the aromatic salt, or, pepper, salt and sage.
Strip the meat from the ducks or chickens when cold--there should be 1 1/2 pounds of it--cut it in very small dice as if for salad, likewise the boiled eggs and onion and bread crumbs. Mix all, moisten with the raw eggs and goose fat or butter. Fill the boned goose, or two or three ducks with the forcemeat, strew the jelly over, and proceed as for turkey galantines. The jelly remains in the galantines and sets richly amongst the forcemeat. The above is quite an ornamental mixture, sliced cold, and savory. Pork sausage with some bread crumbs, strips of pork and red tongue makes another good filling.
It takes from 2 to 3 hours time to bone and prepare a galantine for the boiler, that is including the forcemeat or godiveau it is stuffed with, but it takes but little more time to prepare two or three than one when the operations are once under way. "Soon after our walk over the farm, we sat down to a table, which was abundantly supplied. There was a superb joint of corned beef, a stewed goose, and a magnificent haunch of mutton, with vegetables of all kinds, and at each end of the table two huge jugs of excellent cider, of which I never tired drinking." --The Gastronomer in Connecticut It is nothing, or next to nothing, to make a salade a la Russe or Muscovite or to put up a galantine de perdreaux a la royale. Suppose not many can, not many want them and it comes out even. But there are some things that all hotel and eating-house keepers must do or have done right that are quite difficult--getting the management of that heaviest item, the butcher meats, down to a fine point, for instance. The trying time of the man of the "back part of the house" does not come of the fine dishes, the uncommon things, the fresh delicacies which money will procure in the markets; the grand difficulty which so few can steadily face and over come is made up of a lot of small ones too ridiculous almost to specify--the difficulty of getting the coffee made always alike and sent in always hot and yet not spoiled by boiling; of making somebody attend to their duty of keeping warm cups and plates; of getting cooks to make delicate fried mush and conscientious oatmeal porridge and clean-looking fresh fried potatoes.
We try to keep to a rule in these writings of not underrating or passing by as useless anything that we have not tried, sifted, proved, weighed and measured and arrived at the worth of, and in that way earn the right to repeat again and again, there are needed fifty thousand cooks (or call them what you will) who will take interest enough to make the common unconsidered trifles well, for every one that is wanted to make pieces montees and monstrosities in wax and tallow.
The sort of cooks to cultivate, who are always wanted and for whom a little more wages than the ordinary is no objection with hotel-keepers are those who will fry eggs clean, white and appetizing, not black and smoked at the edges; who can make batter-cakes as good without eggs as the common run can with half a dollar's worth mixed in; who can make common rolls so good they can not be surpassed and take pride enough to rise half an hour earlier to do so; cooks who will bake pies well done on the bottom. And what profit is it to the hotel--keeper to have in the larder a jambon a la gelee a la Francaise, which the guests may or may not recognize and may or may not be afraid to call for, if the corned beef is put on to cook only an hour or two before dishing-up time, is tough and rejected for dinner, sliced, rejected and thrown away after supper?
These minor obstacles to a perfect table are never quite overcome, but when I hear a hotel uncommonly well spoken of in this respect I am certain that a large measure of success has been attained, and I wonder then if there is not some one in the back part of that house looking thin-faced and tired?
This is the forcemeat for a boned bird, not a standalone dish; the cooking itself is deferred to the book's turkey galantine. A few things need translating before it will work in a modern kitchen.
- Skip the "aromatic salt"The page carries a warning that it recommends chemical preservatives such as salicylic acid, borax or formaldehyde, and the formulas for spiced or aromatic salts of this period varied. Take the alternative the recipe itself offers: pepper, salt and sage, worked to taste.
- The missing method"Proceed as for turkey galantines" means: sew or truss the stuffed skin closed, roll it tightly in a cloth or several layers of cheesecloth, tie at intervals, and poach it submerged in stock at a bare shiver, never a rolling boil, which splits the skin and squeezes out the fat.
- Cook to temperature, not clockA large stuffed goose galantine will want roughly 2 to 2 1/2 hours at about 175-180F water temperature, but the number that matters is 165F at the centre of the forcemeat. Raw eggs bind the mixture and must set through.
- Press and chillCool the galantine in its poaching liquid until warm, then lift it out still wrapped, weight it flat overnight in the refrigerator. Without pressing it will not slice cleanly, which is the entire point of the dish.
- Meat jelly or aspicThis is reduced, gelatinous poaching stock, set firm. Chill it, dice it small, and strew it through the forcemeat as directed; it melts during poaching and resets in the cold galantine as the moist pockets the recipe promises.
- Bread crumbsTwelve ounces is a large amount against 1 1/2 pounds of meat. The recipe says only "white bread crumbs"; drier crumbs from stale bread are the likelier reading, and packaged dried crumbs are not what is meant.
- Goose fatHalf a cup rendered and melted, cooled to barely warm before it meets the raw eggs. The recipe already sanctions butter instead, and butter is the easier substitute if you are working from ducks.
- YieldA large boned goose carrying this quantity of filling makes a substantial buffet piece, sliced cold, and keeps three or four days refrigerated, wrapped.
A galantine is a bird boned out through the back, stuffed, rolled, poached and served cold in slices; the origin of the name is disputed, with one contested theory linking it to Old French forms related to galine, a hen, and another to Old French galatine / Medieval Latin galatina, a jellied sauce. By the 1880s it was standard high-end American hotel work, and Jessup Whitehead wrote for exactly that trade, which is why the recipe assumes you already know the turkey version and spends its detail on the filling instead. The essay tacked on after it is Whitehead's real subject: he was contemptuous of showpiece cookery for its own sake and kept insisting that the hotel kitchen was judged on coffee, corned beef and fried eggs rather than on a galantine de perdreaux. The preservative salts flagged at the head of the page belong to the same decades, before the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the state laws that followed pushed borax, salicylic acid and formaldehyde out of the American larder.