Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Braised Partridges and Cabbage
Braised Partridges and Cabbage
Truss a couple of old partridges as for boiled chickens. Put them in a sautepan and brown them slightly over a brisk fire. Cut some bacon and two onions into dice, put them in a braising pan with the partridges, surround them with stock and braise till three parts done. Wash thoroughly a young cabbage, then blanch, drain, and dry it; put it in with the partridges, and finish cooking them together. When cooked make a bed of the cabbage on a hot dish and put the patridges on it with the pieces of bacon around. Strain the cooking liquor through a fine hair sieve, boil it until reduced, keeping the partridges hot at the same time. When ready pour the sauce round, and serve. Braised Partridges, Financiere Singe, draw, wipe and truss two partridges with their wings inside. Lay a piece of pork rind in a saucepan, adding one carrot and one onion, both cut in slices, two bay leaves, one sprig of thyme, and the two partridges, seasoning with a little salt and pepper. When the birds have assumed a good golden color on the hot stove, moisten with one-half pint of broth; put the saucepan in the oven and cook for twenty minutes longer. Dress them on a dish, untruss, pour over one-half pint of hot financiere sauce, and serve. The gravy from the partridges can be utilized for making the financiere sauce. Braised Partridges, Perigueux Clean three partridges and truss them as for boiling. Fasten some thin slices of fat bacon round them, put them in a stewpan with three-fourths of a pint of mirepoix and one-fourth pint of essence of truffles, put a sheet of buttered paper over them, stand the stewpan over a slow fire and let the contents simmer till the partridges are done. Cut a three-sided block of bread three inches high, two and one-half inches at the base and one and one-half inches at the top, fry it, and then fix it in the middle of a dish with a paste prepared with a little flour and white of egg. Drain the partridges when cooked and place one on each side of the bread. Shape three large partridge forcemeat quenelles like pears and put one between each bird; mix some essence of partridge with perigueux sauce, pour it over the birds, put a large truffle on top of the bread, fill a sauceboat with the same sauce, and serve it with the partridges.
Three separate braises have been run together here, and the type is corrupted in places — "Financiere Singe" is a stray heading followed by singe, French for the pork rind used to line the pan. Read them as three recipes, not one.
- The birdsWild partridge is seldom sold in American markets; farmed chukar will stand in, as will two poussins or Cornish hens, which braise the same way. The first two recipes use two birds, the Périgueux version three; two birds will serve two to three, three birds three to four.
- Why "old" partridgesThe first recipe specifies old birds deliberately. Young game is roasted; tough, mature birds are the ones worth braising, and the long moist cooking is what makes them edible. If your birds are young and tender, cut the braising time sharply and check at 25 to 30 minutes.
- Oven and stovetop heat"A brisk fire" for the initial browning means high heat, and "a slow fire" for the Périgueux simmer means the barest tremble, not a boil. No oven temperature is given for the financière stage; a moderate oven, roughly 325 to 350F in modern terms, will suit the twenty minutes called for.
- Mirepoix, 1896 senseThree-quarters of a pint of mirepoix is not chopped raw vegetables but the old cooked preparation: diced carrot, onion, celery and ham or bacon sweated in butter with herbs, moistened with wine or stock, used as a braising cushion. Substitute a well-reduced vegetable-and-ham braising base.
- The saucesFinancière is a Madeira-based demi-glace with truffle essence; Périgueux is demi-glace with chopped truffle and Madeira. Both assume a house stock pot. A good reduced brown stock with Madeira and a little truffle paste or oil gets you within reach; bottled truffle essence is the modern equivalent of the "essence of truffles."
- Blanching the cabbageDo not skip it. Two to three minutes in boiling salted water, then drain and press dry, removes the sulfurous edge and keeps the cabbage from watering down the braise. Add it only for the last stretch of cooking.
- Buttered paperThe sheet of buttered paper over the Périgueux birds is a cartouche — it holds moisture against the meat and stops the exposed breast drying. A round of parchment cut to the pan does the same job.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve was the standard fine strainer of the period. A chinois or a fine mesh strainer lined with a doubled cheesecloth is the equivalent.
- The bread plinthThe fried three-sided croûton in the last recipe is pure service architecture, a socle to raise the birds on the platter. It is edible but structural, and can be left out with no loss to the dish.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) was compiled by the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, drawing heavily on existing professional sources, and pages like this one show how thoroughly that repertoire was French. Partridge braised with cabbage is the classic perdrix aux choux, a peasant treatment of tough old game birds that Escoffier's generation carried into the grand hotel dining room unchanged in method and merely dressed up in the plating. The other two versions here are named for their sauces in the standard nineteenth-century manner: financière, generally traced to the rich garnish of truffles, cockscombs and olives thought fit for financiers, and Périgueux, named for the Dordogne town at the center of the French black truffle trade. That an American hotel cookbook expected its readers to have essence of truffles, a mirepoix and a demi-glace on hand suggests something about who was likely cooking from these books in the 1890s — presumably professional kitchens with a stock pot always going, and the ambitious households that kept a trained cook.