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Aspic of Partridges
Cut the fillets off the breast of a couple of partridges, season each fillet with salt and pepper, lay them in a buttered bakingdish, cover them with a sheet of buttered paper, and bake them. When the fillets are cooked put them between two plates with a weight on top and leave until cold. Roast the remainder of the birds, cut off all the flesh, chop it up, put it in a mortar with an equal quantity of chopped lean veal and the same each of butter and breadcrumbs that have been moistened with stock, and squeezed almost dry. Pound the mixture until quite smooth, then mix with it a small quantity of powdered sweet herbs, the white of one egg and yolks of two, and a small quantity of game stock. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and pass it through a fine hair-sieve. Butter a plain mould, turn the mixture into it, and steam for half an hour. Turn the forcemeat out of the mould and leave it until cold; then cut it into slices, and then the fillets into rounds of one size and thickness. Slice some cooked truffles, and some hard-boiled white of egg. Pour a thin layer of aspic liquid jelly into a plain mould, and leave it until it begins to set; then arrange tastefully over it some of the above ingredients, pour in another layer of the jelly, then another layer of the meat, etc. and jelly again alternately until the mould is full. Place the mould in the ice-box or other cool place. When the jelly is firm turn the contents of the mould onto a dish, garnished with sprigs of well washed parsley, chopped aspic, and halves of hard-boiled eggs, and serve.
A layered cold game aspic of the kind that carried a Waldorf buffet table. Almost all of the work is done a day ahead; the only real skill is judging when the jelly is tacky enough to hold the garnish in place.
- The hinge: set each layer before adding the nextChill every layer of jelly until it is tacky and no longer flows before laying meat on it, then add the next layer cool but still liquid. Warm jelly poured onto soft jelly melts the previous layer and the pattern slides into a muddle.
- PartridgesFarmed grey or chukar partridge weigh about 12-16 oz each and are sold frozen by game dealers. Two birds give four small breast fillets plus perhaps 6 oz of leg and carcass meat. Squab, quail (allow four) or boned pheasant thigh substitute without changing the method.
- "Bake them" and "roast the remainder"The book gives no temperature. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits the buttered, paper-covered fillets; allow roughly 12-15 minutes and take them to 165F at the thickest point. They are being served cold and set in jelly, so undercooking is not an option. Roast the rest of the birds hotter, around 400F, until the leg juices run clear, about 25-30 minutes.
- Buttered paperA round of buttered parchment laid directly on the meat. It keeps the lean breast from drying without steaming it the way foil would.
- Pressing the filletsTwo plates and a weight compact the meat so it slices into clean rounds without crumbling. A can or two of tomatoes is ample; press in the refrigerator, not on the counter.
- Mortar and hair sieveA food processor does the pounding in a minute. The sieving step still matters for the glassy texture Oscar wanted: push the puree through a fine-mesh sieve with a stiff rubber spatula, or use a drum sieve if you have one.
- Steaming the forcemeatButter the mould, cover it tightly, and steam over simmering water about 30 minutes, to an internal 160F. It contains raw egg and raw veal, so check the temperature rather than the clock; cool it fully before slicing or it will tear.
- Aspic jellyOscar assumes a clarified game or veal stock set with its own gelatin. From modern stock, use about 1 tablespoon powdered gelatin (roughly four to five sheets of leaf gelatin) per 2 cups of well-flavoured, degreased stock, and clarify with an egg-white raft if you want it clear enough to see the garnish.
- Timing and yieldA 1-quart mould serves six to eight as a first course. Build it the day before and unmould by dipping the base in warm water for a few seconds; keep it refrigerated and return leftovers to the cold within two hours.
Aspic work like this was the visible proof of a French-trained kitchen brigade at the end of the nineteenth century: an expensive game bird broken down into three separate preparations (pressed fillets, a pounded forcemeat, a clarified jelly) and then reassembled as a decorated cold centrepiece for a buffet or supper service. Oscar Tschirky was maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf, and later the Waldorf-Astoria, from 1893, and his 1896 book sets down the sort of repertoire the house served, in the compressed professional shorthand of the period, which is why instructions like "pass it through a fine hair-sieve" and "arrange tastefully" survive unexplained: the reader was assumed to have seen it done. Partridge appears repeatedly in such books because American hotels of the period drew on a large commercial wild-game trade, a commerce curtailed in the United States by the Lacey Act of 1900; the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended market hunting of the migratory species it covered, though the upland birds Americans commonly called "partridge" were regulated by the states rather than by that treaty. Cold moulded galantines and aspics of this shape were themselves a legacy of Antonin Careme's early nineteenth-century grande cuisine, kept alive in hotel kitchens long after they had left the domestic table.