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Boiled Partridges with Cream Sauce
Pluck, singe and draw six birds without breaking the entrails, wipe them with a wet towel and put them in a pan with sufficient boiling water to cover; add one tablespoonful of salt and boil them slowly for fifteen minutes. Meanwhile put one-half pint of thick cream into a saucepan set in a pan of boiling water, add to it one tablespoonful of butter and one-fourth saltspoonful of white pepper, and stir one way till the butter is melted, then leave the sauce where it will keep hot. When the partridges are done put them on a hot dish, dry them with a soft cloth, pour the cream sauce over, and serve them hot, garnished with sprigs of parsley.
A plain poaching method that depends entirely on the quality of the birds and the richness of the cream. The whole point is restraint: nothing is browned, nothing is thickened, and any overcooking shows immediately.
- Sourcing the birdsWild-taken partridge is generally not sold commercially in the United States under state game laws; what you can buy is farmed chukar or gray partridge, usually around 12-16 oz dressed and normally sold already plucked and drawn. Poussins or Cornish hens will stand in acceptably, though the flavour is milder.
- "Boil them slowly"This means a bare simmer, water barely trembling. A rolling boil tears the skin of small birds and drives the breast meat stringy well before the legs are done.
- Check the temperature, not the clockThe stated fifteen minutes may be enough for a very small bird and will not be for a larger one. Poultry is generally recommended to reach 165F at the thickest part of the thigh, so verify with a thermometer rather than trusting the stated time.
- Half a pint of thick creamOne cup of heavy cream, 36% fat or better. 'Thick cream' in period recipes most likely means the rich skimmed top cream rather than anything thin; in any case do not substitute half-and-half, which will not hold together under the butter.
- A saltspoonfulA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so one-fourth of one is a scant pinch of white pepper. The seasoning is meant to be almost invisible.
- The double boiler"A saucepan set in a pan of boiling water" is a bain-marie, used here so the cream never approaches a simmer and cannot break or catch. Keep it there until the moment of serving rather than reheating.
- Stirring one way'Stir one way' is a stock instruction in cookbooks of the period, whatever reasoning lay behind it. Direction as such makes no difference, but gentle single-direction stirring does keep you from whipping air into the sauce.
- Drying the birdsNot a fussy detail. Poached birds carry a film of water that thins the sauce and makes it slide off; blot them well before saucing.
- YieldSix birds, one per person, as a main course with the sauce spooned over. Boiled or steamed potatoes and watercress suit it better than anything sweet.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) catalogued the range of a large hotel kitchen, and game birds were a fixture of the Waldorf's autumn and winter menus, when the market game trade still moved barrels of wild partridge, grouse and quail into New York restaurants; the Lacey Act of 1900 and later state laws ended commercial traffic in wild game, which is why a recipe calling casually for six partridges reads as a period document. Poaching was a standard treatment in invalid cookery, where boiled fowl with cream sauce appears again and again in nineteenth-century manuals as the mildest way to serve meat. The name "partridge" was applied loosely in American kitchens of the era, often to ruffed grouse or bobwhite quail as well as to the European gray partridge, so the birds Oscar's cooks handled were not necessarily all the same species: it was the size and the youth of the bird that mattered to the method.