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Chaudfroid of Plovers
Quarter four plovers which have been previously either baked or roasted and are cold; remove the skin and bones; place the entrails in a mortar, pound and rub them through a fine sieve. Prepare a small quantity of thick gravy or extract of game with the bones and trimmings of the plovers, straining through a sieve and taking off all fat and reduce it to half glaze; then add half a pint of brown sauce to thicken it and boil for a few minutes, when it will be ready for use. Pour the gravy slowly into the pounded entrails and add a third of its quantity of liquid aspic jelly; when the sauce becomes cold stir over the ice until thick; dip the quarters of plovers in it, coating them well, and arrange them on a baking sheet to let the sauce set; then remove all superfluous sauce from the quarters, pile them on a dish with the legs turned toward the bottom and wings to the top in the center of a border of the aspic jelly, and serve.
This is a professional garde-manger preparation from the Waldorf's cold kitchen, and it cannot be reproduced today. The reasons are legal as much as culinary.
- Plovers cannot be obtainedAll plovers native to North America are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and the piping plover is separately listed as threatened or endangered depending on population. There is no lawful commercial source for the bird in the United States, and the golden plover and black-bellied plover that market gunners once supplied to hotels in quantity were among the species the Act was written to save.
- The entrails are the problem, not just the birdThe entrails -- Small game birds of this kind were traditionally served undrawn, and the recipe depends on the whole trail being pounded into the sauce. The birds have been baked or roasted first, so the offal has been cooked with the bird; but everything after that is cold work -- the gravy is cooled, the mixture is stirred over ice, and the coating sets cold -- and wild-bird viscera are handled cautiously in modern practice.
- An aspic held at cold-room temperatureThe finished quarters sit coated in a gelatin-bound sauce while it sets, then are arranged and served from a jelly border. A 1900 hotel had an ice room and a brigade working at speed; a domestic kitchen assembling a meat-and-offal aspic over hours is working in the temperature range where bacteria multiply.
- What the terms meanChaudfroid is literally "hot-cold": a sauce cooked hot, then set cold as a coating. Half glaze corresponds to what is usually called demi-glace, a reduced brown sauce or stock; "brown sauce" here is presumably the book's espagnole. "Half a pint" is one cup. These are worth knowing for reading the rest of the cold-kitchen chapter, not for attempting this dish.
- If you want a chaudfroidUse a current recipe built on legally sourced poultry and a properly cooked, chilled sauce base. The technique survives; this particular bird and this particular filling do not.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the Waldorf's kitchen at the moment American hotel cooking was at its most Escoffier-minded, and the cold-larder chapter is where that shows most clearly: chaudfroid, aspic borders, and birds rebuilt into architecture on a silver dish. Plovers reached those kitchens by the barrel. Market hunting for the table was still an industry in the 1890s, and shorebirds — golden plover, black-bellied plover, curlew, the all but certainly extinct Eskimo curlew — were shot on migration and shipped to eastern cities in numbers that collapsed the flocks within a generation. The Lacey Act of 1900 curtailed interstate traffic in illegally taken game, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended the trade outright. A recipe calling casually for four plovers, pounded entrails and all, is a small piece of evidence about how ordinary that supply once seemed, and how quickly it went.