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Russian Cutlets
Cover bottom of cutlet moulds with Russian Pilaf and cover Pilaf with Chicken Force-meat II (see p. 150), doubling the recipe and omitting nutmeg. Set moulds in pan of hot water, cover with buttered paper, and bake in a moderate oven fifteen minutes. Remove from moulds to serving dish, surround with Brown Mushroom Sauce, and garnish with parsley.
Russian Pilaf. Wash one-half cup rice. Mix one cup highly seasoned chicken stock with three-fourths cup stewed and strained tomato, and heat to boiling-point. Add rice, and steam until rice is soft. Add two tablespoons butter, stirring lightly with a fork that kernels may not be broken, and season with salt.
A composed moulded entrée in the Fannie Farmer manner: a layer of tomato pilaf under a smooth chicken forcemeat, baked gently in a water bath and unmoulded. Most of the work is in reading the cross-references.
- The hinge: cook the forcemeat throughFifteen minutes in a water bath will not reliably bring a mould of raw ground chicken to a safe temperature, especially in deeper moulds. Bake until the centre reads 165F on an instant-read thermometer, which in practice usually means 25 to 35 minutes; the water bath keeps the forcemeat from tightening while you wait.
- Cutlet mouldsSmall moulds shaped like a chop, a standard piece of late nineteenth-century kitchen tin. Straight-sided ramekins, a muffin tin, or dariole moulds all work; butter them well and expect to run a knife round the rim before turning out.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read today as somewhere around 350F; the book itself gives no figures. With a water bath the exact temperature matters less than the water level, which should come halfway up the moulds and be hot when it goes in.
- Buttered paperButtered parchment, laid directly on the moulds. It stops a skin forming and keeps condensation from the bath off the surface; foil does the same job but sticks unless greased.
- Chicken Force-meat IIThe book's second chicken forcemeat, cross-referenced on p. 150; forcemeats of this type are essentially a quenelle mixture. A food processor does in a minute what the original expected from a mortar and sieve; keep the chicken, cream and bowl cold or the mixture will break.
- Stewed and strained tomatoTomatoes cooked down and pushed through a sieve, i.e. passata or a smooth tomato purée. Not tomato paste, which is far too concentrated at three-fourths cup.
- The pilafOne and three-quarter cups liquid to half a cup of rice is generous by modern absorption-method standards. Use long-grain rice, cover, cook 18 to 20 minutes, and drain off anything that has not been taken up before you fork in the butter; the grains need to stay separate so the layer holds its shape.
- YieldThe doubled forcemeat and this quantity of pilaf will fill a small batch of moulds; the exact count depends on the size of the moulds and on the forcemeat recipe on p. 150.
Nineteenth-century American cookery drew on the fashionable manner filtered through French kitchens, where service à la russe — courses brought in sequence rather than all at once — had reshaped the formal dinner. The pilaf here is the Persian and Ottoman dish, its name generally traced to Persian polow; by the 1890s American cookbooks spelled it pilaf, pilau or pilaw more or less interchangeably. The dish itself belongs to the entrée section of Fannie Farmer's book, that stretch of the menu given over to small, shaped, sauced constructions that showed off a cook's command of forcemeat and moulds. Its logic is the logic of the Boston Cooking School generally: standard component recipes, cross-referenced and recombined, so that a household with chicken stock and a set of tin moulds could produce something that looked like restaurant work.