Galantines
A galantine, strictly, is any kind of meat with the bones taken out, but that is not the common understanding; and it is not strictly obliged to be a cold dish--that is according to dictionary definitions of the word--but yet the general understanding is that it should be. In one of the royal menus recently passed in review through this column there is a dish of galantines of quail with truffles among the entrees, and, although one has no means of reaching a certainty on such a point, it is quite as likely it was a hot dish of boneless quails as a cold one. The boned legs of fowls stuffed with a force meat are termed galantines by one of our authorities, cold, however. Whatever may have been the meaning a hundred years ago it would look very ridiculous now to call a rolled up filet of veal or a boned ribs of beef rolled up, a galantine, or a boned boar's head a galantine. The term is applied only to fowls of all kinds and birds.
Another unwritten distinction I find is made by cooks--and I have met with a good many of all sizes, and who never knew the drift of my cross-questioning, and that is to call a boned fowl a boned fowl, and only call it a galantine when it is ornamented. This is as it should be, for the word galantine is from the same root as the French gallantin, gallant, "a beau," "something pleasant to look upon," `a nobby fellow," as it is variously defined. Many good things on the bill of fare are partly thrown away for want of a popular understanding of the names, hence we think the space devoted to this question is not wasted, and now will try to observe the distinction between plain boned turkey and turkey galantine. "Four-year-old mutton modestly disclaiming its own merits by affecting the shape and assuming the adjuncts of venison." --Eugene Aram. "`Does he say he is a cuisinier ? because if he does he's a quizzin'-yer,' says Mr. Weg." --Pendennis.
Doubtless there is some sort of responsibility attached to this privilege of wide spread publicity through the columns of a daily newspaper. It is not quite the same as depositing matters snugly between book covers, never to be opened, never to be seen, and no harm done. Perhaps it is my duty to bring the little power much multiplied to the rescue of the noble bird of Thanksgiving, the American turkey, from the prevailing misusage which makes it under the name of boned turkey to serve but as a distended lion's hide to cover the recreant meat of a calf, and this without intent of palming off a sham, but simply because of wrong teaching.
Some two or three years ago it lay in my way to remark in these columns that a boned fowl should be stuffed with another boned fowl, and I have since been told that some old parodies were as much astonished thereat as were certain other old parties when Oliver Twist asked for more. Still the world moves. As for the consumer's part no words are needed to show him that when he asks for a plate of boned turkey he should not receive for it a mess of hashed veal in a thin-stretched turkey's skin.
As for the landlord or employer, who is most likely to be looked upon as responsible for the perpetration of a species of fraud too small even to kick about, he knows nothing whatever about it, and may even have wondered that his own plate of boned turkey should seem so far from turkey and so near Bologna sausage. The fault is with the regular cooks, and primarily with the European teachers of cookery from whom all our hotel a la's are derived. Were this a trick of the trade (but indeed there are very few tricks in our trade) of advantage economically or otherwise, silence might be golden in respect to it, but while our prolific Southern and Western States turn off poultry cheaper during large portion of the year than veal, it must be matter of surprise that but few of our people know what genuine boned turkey is, for the reason that the cooks will push the poultry aside and take trouble to use veal instead at a cost about a third higher. This is Old-World routine. The cook does as he learned of an older cook and the older refers to the books which direct to stuff boned turkeys, and indeed almost everything of the kind with minced veal. Probably those teachers had good reasons of expediency. Turkey may have been an expensive luxury and had to be eked out. Possibly they made genuine boned turkey for kings and such, and thought veal good enough for people. At any rate they had white veal that might pass for chicken. In any European city may be seen, or might have been before Mr. Bergh's time, butchers' carts packed with dying calves lying on their backs, their heads hanging over the edge, their throats half cut, dripping blood over the cobble stones, making white veal. Our butchers are less brutal and our veal is less white. Some of our butchers are so tender-hearted they will seldom kill a calf at all till his horns are well grown in the second year of his age, and do what you will that sort of veal always refuses to look like chicken. We have to change our ways with the changed times. Our people are all able and willing to pay for boned turkey and they want it, and not beef sausage. We will have another way of stuffing a boned turkey besides the annexed, but this, to use the words of a delighted club member, just recently, "takes the cheese"--whatever that may mean. The gentleman is a Britisher having millions in mines, (can't get'em out), but, thanks to the error of French cookery he had never stuck his fork before into so unmistakably genuine a galantine as this.