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Flemish Garnish
This is made with a cooked knuckle of ham, boiled bacon, sausages, German sausage, boiled carrots and turnips, and glazed onions. The larger part of the garnish is composed of well-boiled white cabbages which have been thoroughly dried in a saucepan; Brussels sprouts may also be used. This is an excellent garnish for rump steak, tenderloin of beef or roasted ham.
This is a classical garniture in the French sense — a fixed set of accompaniments served around a roast, not a decoration. Oscar assumes you know how each component is cooked and gives you only the roster and the one step that matters.
- The hinge: dry the cabbageBoiled cabbage holds an enormous amount of water, and if it goes to the platter wet it will thin the pan gravy and make everything else soggy. After boiling, drain hard, then turn it in a dry saucepan over moderate heat until the steaming stops.
- "Garnish" means the whole plateIn turn-of-the-century menu French, a garniture is the full complement of vegetables and meats surrounding the joint. Flemish garnish is effectively the side of the meal, and the proportions given — cabbage as "the larger part" — are the recipe.
- Knuckle of hamThe hock end, sold today as a smoked ham hock or ham shank. It wants long, gentle simmering — a couple of hours or so — until the meat slips from the bone; the recipe specifies it already cooked, so simmer rather than roast.
- German sausageAround 1900 this generally meant a large cooked, smoked sausage of the bologna or cervelat type, sliced. A ring of kielbasa or a piece of good garlic sausage sits in the same place; the point is a cured, coarse-textured contrast to the fresh sausages beside it.
- Boiled baconNot rashers. A slab of unsmoked cured pork belly or a piece of Irish-style back bacon, simmered whole and sliced thick. American streaky bacon will disintegrate.
- Glazed onionsSmall peeled onions cooked in butter with a little sugar and stock until the liquid reduces to a shining coat, roughly 25 to 30 minutes over low heat. Pearl onions work; anything larger than a golf ball will not glaze evenly.
- Vegetable cutsCarrots and turnips for a classical garniture are turned or cut to matching batons so they cook at one rate and read as deliberate. Boil separately — turnip water will muddy the carrots.
- Scale and timingNo quantities are given; the garnish is built to the size of the joint. As a rough editorial estimate for eight, you might figure one hock, a pound of slab bacon, half a pound each of fresh and smoked sausage, a pound each of carrot and turnip, sixteen small onions and two heads of cabbage — none of this is in the original. Everything can be cooked ahead and reheated in a little of the ham broth.
Garnishes named for places were the shorthand of the classical French kitchen: à la flamande — in the Flemish manner — signalled cabbage, root vegetables and cured pork, the standing repertoire of Flanders and the Low Countries, where the same ingredients go into the boiled dinner called hochepot. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms in the years when Escoffier and Gilbert were codifying these garnitures into a fixed vocabulary, and a cook who read "Flemish" on a menu card was expected to produce something along these lines without further instruction — though the details varied between authorities, and the book itself allows Brussels sprouts as an alternative — which is why the entry reads as a list rather than a method. Its presence in an American hotel book is a reminder of how much of the grand-hotel kitchen was Franco-Belgian in its bones, and how peasant food from the northern provinces reached New York's dining rooms dressed in French terminology and arranged around a rump steak.