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Braised Pheasant
Prepare and truss a pheasant as for boiling. Line a stewpan with slices of fat bacon and one or two thick slices of veal, put in the bird, season it well with salt and pepper, add a few sweet herbs, cover it with more slices of bacon and veal, cover the stewpan down perfectly air-tight, and put it in a moderate oven and cook for two hours. When done place it on a hot dish, strain over it some of the gravy that will have run from it while cooking, garnish it with sliced lemons, and serve.
Braised Pheasant, Financiere Prepare and braise two pheasants. Then prepare a financiere, garnishing with foies gras, cockscombs, truffles and pheasant forcemeat quenelles, and mix with them some financiere sauce. Put a block of fried bread in the center of a dish, sticking it onto the dish with the white of egg and flour paste; arrange the pheasants, leaning against each end of the bread, put the garnishing in the dish in order, put a row of pheasant forcemeat quenelles between each pheasant, a cooked and larded sweetbread each side of the bread, with cooked truffles on each. Put four crayfish and some cockscombs in the spaces, and put another larded and sweetbread on top of the bread. Get five silver attelettes and garnish them with cockscombs, truffles and crayfish, stick them in the pheasants and sweetbreads, and serve with a sauceboatful of financiere sauce that has been reduced with essence of pheasant.
Two recipes in one entry: a plain braise, and the same bird dressed as a financière centrepiece for a hotel dining room. The first is cookable tonight; the second is a set piece from an era of silver skewers and footed platters.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F, though the book gives no figure. For a covered braise, 325F is the safer reading, since the pot will hold heat well past the set temperature.
- The hinge: the seal"Cover the stewpan down perfectly air-tight" is the whole method. Kitchens of the period luted the lid with a rope of flour-and-water paste; a sheet of parchment pressed under a heavy lid, or foil crimped over the rim, does the same job. Without the seal the bird steams dry and there is no gravy to strain over it.
- Two hours is for a wild birdAn old wild cock pheasant needs that long. A farmed bird of 2 to 2.5 lb is tender and very lean, and will be done in 45 to 60 minutes, with the thigh at 165F. Two hours will turn it to string.
- Bacon and veal are equipment, not garnishThe bacon bards the breast against the dryness pheasant is prone to, and the veal slices form a bed that gives up gelatine into the pan juices. Use unsmoked fatty bacon or sheets of pork back fat, and a thick slice of veal shoulder or a piece of veal shank. The veal is not meant to be served.
- "Trussed as for boiling"That means legs drawn tight into the body and wings pinned flat, so the bird holds a compact shape in the pot rather than sprawling. A single loop of string round the legs and body achieves it.
- Financiere garnishA nineteenth-century standard mixture: cockscombs and cocks' kidneys, truffles, quenelles, mushrooms, bound in a madeira-fortified demi-glace. Cockscombs are effectively unobtainable retail now; sauteed mushrooms and truffle are the usual modern stand-in, and the sauce is a reduced brown sauce with madeira and pheasant carcass stock.
- AttelettesDecorative silver skewers, threaded with garnish and stuck upright into the meat for display. They were never eaten from and are purely architectural, as is the fried bread block glued down with egg white and flour paste.
- Foies gras and sweetbreads"Foies gras" here means slices of foie gras, and the larded sweetbreads must be soaked, blanched, pressed and braised separately before they go anywhere near the platter.
- YieldOne pheasant serves two, generously; the financiere version, with two birds plus sweetbreads and garnish, was built for a table of six to eight.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf dining rooms in the decades when American hotel cooking was an unembarrassed copy of Parisian grande cuisine, and this entry shows both halves of that inheritance. The plain braise is old English and French country practice, the bird sealed in a pot between layers of fat and veal so that it cooks in its own vapour. The financiere dressing is the other world entirely: a garnish named, it is often said, for its expense, and served on the Waldorf's tables at a moment when pheasant was arriving from game farms and shooting estates in real quantity. The block of fried bread, the crayfish, and the five silver skewers are not cooking so much as staging, in the manner Careme codified and Escoffier was already beginning to strip away.