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Financiere Garnish
For this cockscombs, sweetbreads, forcemeat quenelles, artichoke bottoms, mushrooms and truffles, prepared as follows, are used: Take three cockscombs and blanch by steeping them in boiling water, dry and rub off the skin, soak them in water for several hours, dry and stew them in butter, lemon juice and a little salt, moistening with a small quantity of stock. When boiling add three lambs' sweetbreads, six forcemeat quenelles, five artichoke bottoms, six mushrooms and six truffles sliced. The garnish is then ready for use.
This is a component recipe — a classic French garnish assembled in a single pan and then spooned around a braised or roasted centerpiece. Almost all the modernizing work is in sourcing.
- CockscombsNot a supermarket item; they come from whole-bird butchers, halal and Chinese poultry markets, or specialty offal suppliers, usually frozen. The blanch-peel-soak-stew sequence is not optional: the outer skin will not release unless the comb has been in boiling water, and the long cold soak is the traditional step for drawing out blood and whitening the combs. If you cannot get them, the garnish still reads correctly without them.
- Lambs' sweetbreadsSoak them in several changes of cold water for a few hours, then blanch, cool, and peel away the membrane before they go into the pan. Added straight into the simmering butter and stock as written, they will take roughly 15 to 20 minutes to firm through — press them under a weighted plate after blanching if you want clean slices.
- Forcemeat quenellesSmall dumplings of pounded veal, chicken or fish bound with panade and egg, poached in barely trembling salted water until they float and feel set, about 8 minutes for a two-teaspoon quenelle. Poach them separately and add at the end; they will disintegrate if boiled hard in the garnish.
- Artichoke bottomsTurned fresh bottoms are best, but jarred or frozen ones are honest substitutes. Rinse jarred bottoms of brine and quarter them so they take on the butter.
- Six trufflesRead this as period pricing, not modern. Six whole black truffles today would cost more than the rest of the dish put together; a single small truffle, sliced thin, or a spoonful of chopped truffle peelings with a little of their juice gives the same aroma.
- The pan and the liquidUse a wide sauté pan or shallow saucepan, and keep the stock to a few tablespoons — enough to keep everything moist and glazed, not to poach it. Financière garnish should come out coated, not swimming.
- What it goes withIts natural partner is sauce financière, a Madeira-scented demi-glace, poured over braised veal, sweetbreads, vol-au-vent cases or a stuffed poultry breast. Add the garnish to the sauce at the last moment so the mushrooms and truffle keep their edges.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest a garnish for a dish serving roughly four to six. The quantities are proportional, so scale them straight up or down.
Financière belongs to the codified French garnish repertoire that a hotel kitchen of the 1890s was expected to reproduce from memory: a fixed roll call of cockscombs, sweetbreads, quenelles, artichoke bottoms, mushrooms and truffles, bound with a Madeira sauce and named — the usual explanation — for the wealth of the financier who could afford it. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms rather than its stoves, included such garnishes because they were the working vocabulary of the menus he wrote; a dish listed as à la financière needed no further description to a cook or a waiter. The presence of cockscombs is the clearest period marker. They were a standard luxury trim in nineteenth-century French cooking, valued for their gelatinous texture, and they disappeared from American kitchens as offal cookery narrowed in the twentieth century rather than through any change in the birds themselves.