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Fried Grouse Cutlets
Prepare three young grouse and cut them in halves lengthwise, split the drumstick and push it inside the hip; beat each half slightly, skin, roll in clarified butter and breadcrumbs, season with salt and pepper and fry for twelve or fourteen minutes over a moderate fire, turning them so as to cook both sides. Make a sauce as follows: Put a small bunch of herbs in a saucepan with the juice of two lemons and two dessertspoonfuls of finely-chopped shallots; boil for two minutes with the cover on the pan, add one teacupful of raw mushrooms cut into small squares, simmer until the liquor is reduced, then pour in one breakfast cupful of melted meat-glaze. When boiling move the stewpan from the fire and stir in five ounces of butter; when this is melted, without boiling, and the sauce well thickened, add a little vinegar, two tablespoonfuls of gherkins cut into small squares, one tablespoonful of soy and one tablespoonful of tarragon leaves chopped small. Dish the cutlets, and serve with the sauce poured over.
A late-Victorian game dish in two parts: crumbed grouse halves fried in butter, and a lemon-shallot reduction finished with a great deal of butter off the heat. The sauce is where it goes wrong or right.
- The hinge: the butter must not boilOnce the five ounces of butter go in, the pan stays off the heat. Boiling breaks the emulsion and you get a greasy pool instead of a glossy sauce; if it starts to separate, pull it back with a spoonful of cold liquid whisked in hard.
- Old cup and spoon measuresA dessertspoonful is 2 teaspoons, so the shallots come to about 4 teaspoons. A teacupful is roughly 3/4 cup; a breakfast cupful is a generous cup, call it 8-9 fl oz. These were never precise, and the sauce tolerates a range.
- Meat-glazeGlace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A tablespoon or two of commercial demi-glace concentrate dissolved in water to make a cup is the practical equivalent. Do not substitute plain broth, which will not thicken.
- "Soy"Soy sauce, which Victorian British and American kitchens used as a dark savoury seasoning much as they used mushroom ketchup. A tablespoon is assertive against a cup of glaze; add half, taste, then decide.
- Getting grouseWild grouse is not sold in American supermarkets and cannot be bought from hunters; it comes from a licensed game dealer, an import, or your own season. Two spatchcocked quail or a halved Cornish hen per person takes the same treatment, with less time in the pan.
- Frying time and donenessTwelve to fourteen minutes over moderate heat suits a bird of real size; smaller substitutes need 8-10. Go by an instant-read thermometer at the thigh rather than the clock, and note that the crumb coat scorches long before a thick breast is done if the heat creeps up.
- "Split the drumstick and push it inside the hip"A tidying-up trick: the leg is tucked back into the bird so the half lies flat and cooks evenly. Flattening the halves slightly, as directed, matters more than the exact manoeuvre.
- YieldThree grouse give six halves, enough for three to six people depending on the size of the birds and the rest of the menu. The sauce comfortably covers six.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his Cook Book in 1896, when American hotel dining still leaned hard on the game birds of the autumn menu: canvasback, woodcock, quail, and grouse. Calling the halves "cutlets" is a chef's conceit borrowed from French service, where a boned or flattened piece dressed like a côtelette could be crumbed, fried and sauced rather than roasted whole. The sauce itself is recognisably in the family of the piquant brown sauces of the period, with shallot, lemon, gherkin and tarragon doing the work later associated with sauce diable, and the tablespoon of soy is a reminder that bottled soy had been in use in Anglo-American kitchens since the eighteenth century. Wild grouse on a restaurant menu of this period may point to market hunting of a kind later game laws ended, though dealer-supplied and imported birds also reached city kitchens.