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Braised Stuffed Lettuces
Select the required quantity of lettuces, trim, wash, blanch and drain them; then cut out the middle leaves carefully, fill the hollow with a fowl and truffle forcemeat and tie the lettuces round with a string; line a stewpan with some pieces of veal, sliced, put in some chopped carrots, onions and a bunch of sweet herbs and the lettuces. Moisten the latter to half their height with stock and braise. Warm some bechamel sauce together with the yolk of an egg, place the lettuces on a hot dish, and serve with the sauce poured over them.
A classic French braise written in the telegraphic style of a professional kitchen: it assumes you already have stock, forcemeat and bechamel on hand. The points below fill in what Oscar left to the brigade.
- The hinge: the egg yolkThe finished bechamel is enriched with a raw yolk off the heat, or over the barest warmth. If it simmers after the yolk goes in, it will curdle into grains. Whisk a little hot sauce into the yolk first, return it to the pan, and hold it below 180F.
- Which lettuceThis needs a firm, elongated head that survives cooking: romaine (cos) or Little Gem. Modern iceberg is too watery and butterhead too fragile. Allow one head per person as a vegetable course, half a head as a garnish for meat.
- Blanch and drain properlyTwo to three minutes in boiling salted water, then straight into ice water to set the colour. Then squeeze the heads gently in a towel — residual water will thin the braising liquid and make the forcemeat weep.
- Fowl and truffle forcemeatA fowl was a mature stewing hen; use boneless chicken thigh, about 4 oz per head, ground with a little cream, egg white and salt. Fresh truffle is a luxury purchase; a teaspoon of truffle paste or finely chopped preserved truffle per batch reads the same on the plate. Because the stuffing contains raw poultry, braise until it reaches 165F at the centre.
- Lining the stewpan with vealThe veal slices are a barrier, not a serving element — they keep the lettuces off direct heat and add gelatin to the braising liquid. Thin veal scallops, or veal bones and trimmings, work equally well. They are discarded, or saved for another use.
- Bunch of sweet herbs'Sweet herbs' covered a variable bundle of aromatics in this period: parsley, thyme and bay, sometimes marjoram or savory. It amounts to what a French kitchen would tie as a bouquet garni. Tie it so it can be lifted out whole.
- Braise time and temperatureLiquid to half the height of the heads, lid on. The original doesn't say whether the covered stewpan sits over low heat or goes into a moderate oven; either works, and it will take roughly 35 to 45 minutes depending on size. No time is given because a cook checked by feel; the heads should yield to a knife tip with no resistance.
- Untie before servingRemove the strings on the board, not at the table, and blot the heads before saucing. The braising liquid can be strained and reduced to a glaze to spoon around the bechamel.
Braised lettuce is a staple of nineteenth-century French cookery — laitues braisées appear routinely in Carême and Escoffier as a garnish for veal, sweetbreads and poultry — and stuffing the blanched heads with forcemeat is the grand-cuisine elaboration of that idea. Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s, when the hotel kitchen's vocabulary was essentially Parisian, and his 1896 Cook Book reads as a working reference for cooks already fluent in that vocabulary: forcemeats, bechamel and braising liquids are named rather than taught. The dish also reflects a period assumption that lettuce was as much a cooked vegetable as a salad plant, a habit that survived in France long after American cooks came to think of lettuce as raw by definition.