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Goose's Fat Liver Croquettes
Take half a pound each of truffles and fat liver, cut into small pieces of equal size and put them into one quart of hot Spanish sauce reduced with a little essence of truffles and made quite thick. Take them out when cool, separate the pieces, roll them into little balls, dip them into egg beaten up with oil, salt and pepper, and then roll them on a board covered with breadcrumbs. Plunge them into a pan of boiling fat and fry to a light brown color. Take them out, drain, dust over with salt, place them on a napkin on a dish, and serve.
Fried Goose's Fat Liver with Truffle Sauce Take a large liver and without steeping it in water cut it up in slices as near of a size as possible, sprinkle them over with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, dip into beaten egg and then into breadcrumbs. Put half a pound of butter into a flat sautepan; when it is warm, add the slices and fry them over a brisk fire turning them over so as to cook on both sides. When done to a light brown, take them out again, drain, put them in a circle on a dish and stand a boat of perigueux sauce in the center. Garnish with slices of lemon, and serve hot.
Two Waldorf preparations of foie gras, one a fried croquette bound in reduced brown sauce, the other simple flour-egg-crumb slices. Neither is difficult, but both depend on temperature control that the original text takes for granted.
- The hinge: keep everything coldFoie gras begins to render fat at low heat, so the mixture must be thoroughly chilled — an hour or more in the refrigerator — before the balls are rolled, breaded and fried. Warm, soft croquettes burst in the fat and the whole point of the dish leaks out.
- "Spanish sauce"Sauce espagnole: the brown mother sauce of veal stock, browned mirepoix and roux. Substitute a good reduced demi-glace. The text is ambiguous as to whether the quart is measured before or after reducing; either way what is wanted is a thick, near-paste binder that sets firm when cold, not a sauce.
- Essence of trufflesA concentrated truffle infusion sold in bottles at the time. The juice from a tin of preserved truffles, or a very small quantity of a reputable truffle paste, does the same work. Synthetic truffle oil behaves quite differently and is easy to overdo.
- Frying temperatureThe book gives no temperature; by modern practice croquettes are fried at roughly 350-375F. Below that the crumb absorbs fat before it sets; above it the crust colors while the center is still cold. Two to three minutes should give the light brown the recipe asks for.
- The half pound of butterIn the second recipe this is a shallow-frying medium for a whole sliced lobe, not an ingredient measure. Use enough clarified butter to film a wide sauté pan; whole butter over a "brisk fire" will blacken.
- "Without steeping it in water"Nineteenth-century practice often soaked livers in water or milk to draw out blood. Oscar is right to skip it for sautéing — a soaked lobe sheds water into the pan and steams rather than browns.
- Perigueux sauceDemi-glace finished with chopped truffle and Madeira, named for Périgueux in the Dordogne. If you have made the espagnole reduction for the croquettes, hold some back before reducing it to paste and finish it this way.
- YieldA pound of combined truffle and liver, plus its binding sauce, would make perhaps twenty-odd small croquettes -- a first course for six to eight, or a tray of hors d'oeuvre -- though the recipe itself gives no yield.
- SourcingFoie gras is sold as whole lobes (grade A for slicing, B for the croquette mixture) and is restricted or banned in some jurisdictions. Duck liver is far more common than goose today and works in both preparations.
"Fat liver" is a flat English rendering of foie gras, and its appearance here — twice on one page, with truffles in both — signals exactly what the Waldorf was selling in the 1890s: a New York hotel kitchen executing the French repertoire without apology. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who put his name to this book in 1896, was not a chef by trade but the man who ran the dining room, and the recipes he collected reflect the classical grammar of Carême as it was practiced by hotel brigades: a mother sauce reduced to a binder, a garnish sauce named for a French town, everything served on a folded napkin. Croquettes of this kind were a standard way of extending an expensive ingredient, and the technique of setting a rich mixture in stiff brown sauce, chilling it, breading it and frying it was applied across hotel menus of the period to chicken, sweetbreads, lobster and rice.