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Chambord Garnish
This is made of mushrooms, fish quenelles, Geneva sauce, truffles, crayfish, carp's soft roes, and villeroy sauce, prepared as follows: Cook some whole mushrooms and prepare small fish quenelles, moulding them with teaspoons, and when these are ready, mask with Geneva sauce. Boil some whole truffles and crayfish, remove the flesh from the tails, keeping it whole, and cook also some carp's soft roes in villeroy sauce. Arrange these, garnished in heaps, alternately with whole crayfish round the dish.
This is not a dish but a garniture — the ring of set-pieces that surrounded a braised carp à la Chambord on a long platter. Oscar assumes you already have the fish, the two sauces and a working brigade, so the notes below fill in what he leaves out.
- Read it as an assembly, not a recipeEvery element is cooked separately and only brought together at the moment of dressing.
- Geneva sauceSauce génevoise: a fish fumet built on a mirepoix, moistened with red wine, reduced hard, thickened and mounted with a good deal of butter, often with anchovy. It is a coating sauce here — thick enough to cling to a quenelle, not a pouring sauce.
- Villeroy sauceAn allemande or velouté reduced until it is almost a paste, sometimes with mushroom essence and truffle. Its whole purpose is to set solid when cold. Dip the cooked roes, spread them on an oiled tray and chill until firm; classically they are then crumbed and fried, though Oscar stops short of saying so.
- QuenellesA pike or whiting forcemeat, moulded between two teaspoons dipped in hot water. Poach in barely trembling salted water or fumet, well below a simmer, until set -- a rolling boil will blow them apart.
- Carp's soft roesSoft roe is milt, the male sperm sac, not eggs. It is difficult to buy now; herring milt is the usual stand-in where it can be found. Soak in cold water, peel off the membrane, then poach gently in court-bouillon before saucing.
- CrayfishTwo to three minutes in boiling salted water or a court-bouillon is enough; longer and the tail meat toughens. Some are shelled for the heaps, others kept whole for the alternating border Oscar describes.
- Mushrooms and truffles"Whole mushrooms" means small buttons, traditionally turned and cooked in a blanc of water, butter and lemon so they stay white. Whole boiled truffles were a period luxury; a small jar of preserved black truffle, warmed in its own liquor, is the practical modern equivalent.
- Quantity and dressingNo amounts are given because the garnish scales to the fish. Set the elements in distinct mounds rather than scattered; the quantities are left entirely to the cook.
The Chambord garnish takes its name from the Château de Chambord in the Loire, and is generally traced to the grand nineteenth-century French service in which a whole braised carp — a Loire river fish — was presented studded and ringed with its accompaniments. Carême is often said to have codified the style, and by Escoffier's day à la Chambord was a fixed formula in the professional repertoire: red-wine fish sauce, quenelles, truffles, crayfish, mushrooms, soft roes. Oscar Tschirky's inclusion of it, unpriced and unportioned, tells you what kind of book this is — a working aide-mémoire for a hotel kitchen where a cook needed reminding of the components, not instruction in making them. It also marks the outer limit of the Waldorf's ambition around 1896: an elaborate garnish arranged around a freshwater fish.