Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Fillets of Partridges with Truffles
Fillets of Partridges with Truffles
Cut the fillets off the breasts of some partridges, making four fillets of each breast, trim them to a nice shape, lay them in a thickly buttered baking tin, dust over with salt and cover with a sheet of buttered paper. Slightly roast the birds from which the fillets have been removed, cut them into small pieces, put them in a saucepan with a few trimmings of ham, two or three cloves and peppercorns, a bunch of sweet herbs, two shallots, salt to taste and a sufficient quantity of clear stock to cover; one wineglassful of claret may also be added if liked. Boil the whole over a slow fire for from one and a half to two hours. Stir one ounce of butter and one-half ounce of flour in a stewpan over the fire. Skim and strain the liquor from the birds and stir it in gradually with the butter and flour; put in a few button mushrooms and truffles and boil them gently until cooked. Put the fillets in the oven and bake them till just set. When the truffles and mushrooms are cooked take them out of the sauce and pile them in the center of a hot dish; drain the fillets from the butter, arrange them round the truffles, pour the sauce over them, and serve.
A two-part dish: the breasts are cooked briefly and gently, while the rest of the birds are sacrificed to build the sauce. Read it as a game salmis in reverse and the timings make sense.
- The hinge is the carcass stockThe sauce is built on the roasted frames simmered an hour and a half to two hours in clear stock. Skip that and you have a flour-thickened broth. Note that the recipe asks only that the carcasses be "slightly" roasted before they are cut up and go in the pot.
- Four fillets per breastThe phrase is ambiguous: it may mean four fillets taken from the whole breast (two from each side), or four from each side, giving eight per bird. Either way they are thin, and they cook in minutes.
- Oven and donenessNo temperature is given; "bake them till just set" implies a moderate oven and only a few minutes under the buttered paper. Partridge breast is very lean and turns dry and livery if pushed.
- Buttered paperA sheet of buttered parchment laid directly on the fillets, not a lid. It keeps the surface from drying while allowing the meat to warm evenly.
- WineglassfulIn this period roughly two fluid ounces, a quarter cup. Claret means dry red Bordeaux or anything similar.
- Butter and flourOne ounce butter to half an ounce flour is a blond roux, about two tablespoons butter to a scant two tablespoons flour. Cook it a minute or two before the strained stock goes in, and add the stock warm and gradually or it will lump.
- Truffles and button mushroomsFresh black truffle is the intent; a good jarred or canned black truffle works, added near the end since it needs only to heat through. Truffle oil is not a substitute here, as the truffle is served as a vegetable in the center of the dish, not as a flavoring.
- Sourcing the birdsWild partridge is not sold in most of the United States. Farmed partridge, chukar or French red-leg is available frozen from game dealers; two quail breasts approximate one partridge breast if you are scaling.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Figure one partridge per person as a course, two birds minimum to make the sauce worth building, and about a pint of strained stock for four.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and his 1896 book records the kind of cooking a wealthy New York hotel put in front of guests who expected French service. Partridge appeared constantly on American hotel menus of the 1890s, when wild game was still sold commercially by market hunters; the trade was curtailed by the Lacey Act of 1900 and effectively ended for migratory species by later federal protection, which is why the same dish today means a farmed bird. The construction, breast meat cooked separately while the legs and carcass are roasted and simmered into the sauce, is the logic of the French salmis, a preparation generally traced to game cookery of the eighteenth century and one that suits birds too lean to survive long roasting. Truffles piled in the center with the fillets ringed around them is a plating convention of the period, when the garnish announced the price of the plate as clearly as the menu did.