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Devilled Crabs
Page 358.
PAN BROILED LAMB CHOPS À LA LUCULLUS. - Page 376fillets for the making of force-meat. Make a pocket in each large fillet, and stuff with one-half tablespoon force-meat; close pockets, and fasten each with five pieces of truffle, shaped to represent nails and drawn through with a larding needle. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, put in small bakingpan, brush over with cold water, add one-half cup Madeira wine, cover with buttered paper, and bake in a hot oven ten minutes. Arrange cooked mushroom caps overlapping one another the entire length of platter, put a chop frill on bone of each fillet, and put three fillets on each side of mushrooms. Garnish with celery tips and pour around Sauce Suprême. Cook remaining chicken with one small sliced carrot, one onion, one stalk celery, two sprigs parsley, and a bit of bay leaf, with enough water to cover, one hour. Strain and cook stock until reduced to one cup. Melt two tablespoons butter, add two tablespoons flour, and pour on stock; cook slowly fifteen minutes. Add three-fourths cup heavy cream and season with salt and pepper; then add twelve peeled white mushroom caps and cook five minutes. Remove caps to platter and add one-fourth cup heavy cream to sauce.
Chicken Force-meat. Put mignon fillets through a meat chopper, add one-half the quantity of stale bread crumbs cooked with milk until moisture has nearly evaporated. Cool and put through purée strainer; then add one and one-half tablespoons melted butter, yolk one egg, two tablespoons cream, and salt and pepper to taste. Birds on Canapés Split five birds (quails or squabs), season with salt and pepper, and spread with four tablespoons butter, rubbed until creamy, and mixed with three tablespoons flour. Bake in a hot oven until well browned, basting every four minutes with two tablespoons butter, melted in one-fourth cup water. Chop six boiled chickens' livers, season with salt, pepper, and onion juice, moisten with melted butter, and add one teaspoon finely chopped parsley. Spread mixture on five pieces toasted bread, arrange a bird on each canapé, and garnish with parsley.
This is high-style French service as taught to American households around 1900: a chicken taken apart so that the two small tenderloins become stuffed "fillets," the rest of the bird boiled down into a cup of stock for Sauce Suprême, and a second course of small birds on liver canapés. A few of the terms and tools need translating.
- Mignon filletsThe mignon or filet mignon of a chicken is the small strip of tenderloin lying under each breast half, not the large breast. Only the large fillets get pockets; the little ones are ground for the force-meat.
- Hot ovenRead "hot" as roughly 400-450F. "Buttered paper" is plain paper spread with softened butter; parchment or foil can stand in for it.
- The truffle nailsThe five shaped truffle pieces drawn through with a larding needle imitate decorative studs while also fastening the pocket shut; if you skip them, use a toothpick or two. A whole truffle is needed to cut pieces large enough to shape.
- Purée strainerThis is a conical sieve or drum sieve worked with a wooden pestle. A food mill on its finest plate, or a few pulses in a processor followed by a fine-mesh sieve, gives the same smooth force-meat.
- Sauce Suprême timingThe roux and stock want the full fifteen minutes of slow cooking to lose any floury taste. Add the cream off a hard boil; once the mushroom caps go in, five minutes is enough, and the last quarter cup of cream is there to loosen the sauce after the caps come out.
- Chop frillsPaper frills slipped over the exposed bone were standard restaurant dress. They are ornament only and can be left off without changing the dish.
- The birdsSplit quail or squab bake quickly in the same hot oven; the recipe gives no time, only "until well browned," and basting every four minutes as directed is what keeps the butter-and-flour paste browning rather than burning. Cook the birds through.
- YieldThe fillet course serves six, allowing three fillets a side on the platter; the canapés make five portions, one bird apiece.
"À la Lucullus" is one of the grand nineteenth-century French garnish names, borrowed from Lucius Licinius Lucullus, the Roman general whose banquets became a byword for extravagance; in classical kitchen usage the label usually signals truffles, as it does here in the little studs shaped like nails. Sauce Suprême — a velouté of poultry stock finished with cream — belongs to the same codified system, and its appearance in an American cooking-school book shows that French restaurant vocabulary had reached household manuals by the turn of the century. Birds served on a canapé of toast spread with chopped liver was one recognised way to present quail and squab, the bread catching the juices that would otherwise be lost.