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Boundins of Salmon
Remove the skin and bone from one pound of salmon, reduce it to a pulp, and pass it through a fine hair sieve. Mix with the puree ten ounces each of bread panada and crayfish butter, season the mixture with pepper and salt, and bind it with two well beaten eggs and a little reduced lean sauce that has been thickened with egg. Mix an onion that has been fried white and cut into small pieces with the forcemeat. Cut some strips of paper four inches long by two and one-half inches wide, and butter them. Place a piece of forcemeat three and one-half inches wide by one and three-fourths inches long and one and three-fourths inches thick on each strip of paper. Make a hollow in the center of each piece of forcemeat about three-fourths of an inch deep, and three-fourths of an inch wide. Fill the hollows with a salpicon of cooked salmon and truffles mixed in stiffly reduced allemande sauce, cover them with a little of the forcemeat, and wrap the paper round. Put the boudins in a sautepan with a small quantity of stock, and let them simmer gently for fifteen minutes. Drain the boudins, arrange them in a circle on a hot dish, pour over them some allemande sauce thickened with crayfish butter, and serve.
This is classic hotel forcemeat work: a pounded fish mousseline stuffed with a diced garnish, wrapped in buttered paper and poached. Nothing in it is difficult, but almost every component assumes a brigade kitchen where panada, crayfish butter and allemande sauce were already standing by.
- The hinge: keep it cold and poach it gentlyA fish forcemeat bound with egg will break if the butter warms during mixing or if the poaching liquid boils. Work over ice, and hold the stock at a bare tremble — 170-180F — for the full fifteen minutes.
- Bread panadaBreadcrumb soaked in boiled milk with a little butter and salt, then dried over the fire to a stiff paste and cooled. (The flour-based paste sometimes called panada is a different preparation.) Ten ounces of it to a pound of salmon is a lot of starch by modern taste; the result is closer to a dumpling than a mousse. Halving the panada gives a lighter boudin, at some cost to how neatly it holds its shape.
- Crayfish butterCooked crayfish shells pounded with an equal weight of butter, warmed, strained and chilled. Shrimp or lobster shells give the same effect. There is no supermarket substitute worth using; tomato paste and paprika will colour it but not flavour it.
- "Reduced lean sauce"A meatless velouté built on fish fumet, reduced until syrupy and thickened with egg yolk. "Lean" here means maigre — no meat stock — not low in fat.
- Allemande sauceVelouté finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison and lemon. It must not boil once the yolks go in. Oscar uses it twice: stiffly reduced inside the boudin as the binder for the salpicon, and slackened with crayfish butter as the sauce over.
- Sieve and pulpThe hair sieve was the standard way to get a smooth puree by hand. A food processor does the pounding in seconds; still pass the result through a fine drum sieve or tamis if you want the texture the recipe intends.
- The paper wrappersButtered parchment holds the shape while poaching; the recipe says only to wrap the paper round. Parchment tied with string is the safest modern equivalent. Unwrap after draining, not before.
- The stated dimensionsThe measurements for the forcemeat block are garbled in the original — three and a half inches wide by one and three-quarters long does not sit on a four-by-two-and-a-half-inch paper as described. Treat it as a cylinder roughly three and a half inches long and one and three-quarters thick.
- TrufflesFresh black truffle is the intent. A tinned truffle or two, finely diced, is the honest modern stand-in; truffle oil in the salpicon will overwhelm the salmon.
- YieldA pound of salmon with this much panada makes roughly six to eight boudins, depending on how closely you follow the stated block size; figure one or two per person as a first course.
The boudin in French kitchen terms is any sausage-shaped preparation, and by the late nineteenth century the fish boudin blanc is often said to have become a set piece of the grande cuisine repertoire: mousseline forcemeat, a hidden salpicon of diced luxuries, a poach in paper, a rich sauce poured over at the last moment. Oscar Tschirky, ma"itre d'hôtel of the Waldorf from 1893, assembled his 1896 cook book largely from the professional canon of that moment, and pages like this one read as instructions to a saucier rather than to a housekeeper — the panada, the crayfish butter and the allemande are all named as things already made. Crayfish butter in particular tells you about the period: it belongs to a kind of thrift that has largely disappeared from restaurants and never established itself in home cooking.