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Chaudfroid of Woodcocks
Pluck and singe some woodcocks, wrap them in sheets of buttered paper, lay them in a bakingpan and roast them in the oven; do not brown them, but keep them rather underdone. When cold cut the birds into joints, coat them over with chaudfroid sauce that has been reduced with essence of woodcock, and lay them on a dish till the sauce has cooled. Garnish a round border mould with some cooked minion fillets of woodcocks, fill it with aspic jelly and leave it till set. Turn the border of jelly out onto a round dish, put a block of fried bread in the center, arrange the pieces of birds inside the circle, leaning them against the bread support, and serve.
A late-Victorian banquet piece from the Waldorf's kitchen, built on ingredients and handling practices that a modern cook cannot reproduce as written. The vocabulary is worth knowing even if the dish is not worth attempting.
- The birds are deliberately left underdone, then held warm and cold for hoursThe birds are deliberately left underdone, then cooled, jointed, coated and assembled -- Game birds carry Campylobacter and Salmonella, and this method never brings the flesh to a temperature that would deal with them. The coated joints are then left out until the sauce sets, time spent in the range where bacteria multiply fastest.
- Aspic is a growth medium, not a preservativeA rich, low-acid stock jelly setting slowly at room temperature is close to ideal for bacterial growth, and the sealed coating gives no visual or aromatic warning that anything has gone wrong. Nineteenth-century kitchens relied on cold larders, immediate service and a good deal of luck.
- Woodcock cannot simply be boughtIn the United States the American woodcock is a migratory bird protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act: it may be taken only by licensed hunters within a set season and bag limit, and it may never be sold. Restaurant menus of Oscar's day were full of wild game that federal law removed from commerce in the decades that followed. If you want to cook a chaudfroid, use a current recipe and a farmed bird.
- Chaudfroid sauceLiterally "hot-cold": a velouté or brown sauce fortified with enough gelatinous stock that it sets to a coating consistency as it cools. It is applied warm and liquid and eaten cold and firm.
- Essence of woodcockA concentrated reduction made from the carcasses and trimmings, strained and boiled down hard; it carries the flavour of the sauce.
- Minion filletsAn anglicisation of filets mignons — here the two small inner strips of breast meat lying against the keel bone, not the beef cut. On a bird the size of a woodcock they are barely two inches long, which tells you how many birds a garnished border mould required.
- Buttered paper and the block of fried breadThe paper wrapping shields the birds from direct heat, keeping the flesh pale rather than roasted brown, as the recipe requires. The fried bread in the centre is structural: a croûton plinth for the joints to lean against, a common device in period cold buffet work.
Chaudfroid — "hot-cold" — is a French preparation generally traced to the eighteenth century, and traditionally credited to an improvising cook who served a fricassee cold after his master was called away from the table; the story should be read as kitchen folklore rather than record. By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the dining rooms of the Waldorf in the 1890s, chaudfroid had become the signature of the cold buffet: sauce-glazed joints, mirrored aspic, moulded borders and a hidden bread support, all assembled to be looked at as much as eaten. Woodcock belonged to the same register of luxury. It was the most esteemed of small game birds in European cooking, prized for its dark, faintly liverish flesh and traditionally roasted undrawn, and American restaurants of the period served wild game freely. That trade is what makes the recipe read as a period document: within a generation, market hunting of migratory birds was outlawed in the United States, and dishes like this one passed out of professional kitchens along with the supply that fed them.