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Gourmet Garnish
This is composed of artichoke bottoms, mushrooms, truffles, beef palates and Madeira wine and sauce, prepared as follows: Cut a cooked artichoke bottom, either fresh or canned into six pieces of equal size, put them into a saucepan with four mushrooms, two truffles and a small quantity of cooked beef palate, all cut into dice; add half a wineglassful of Madeira wine and cook for five minutes. Pour in one breakfast cupful of Madeira sauce, cook for five minutes longer, and it is then ready for use.
This is not a dish but a garniture — a spoonable mixture meant to be dropped over or around roast beef, sweetbreads, tournedos or vol-au-vent shells. It assumes a stocked professional larder, so most of the modernizing is a matter of substitution.
- The measurementsA wineglassful was conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so half a wineglass is roughly 2 tablespoons of Madeira. A "breakfast cupful" is a generous cup, roughly 8–10 fl oz. Total yield is perhaps 1½ to 2 cups, enough to garnish four to six plates.
- Madeira sauceThe book presumes you already have it. In practice: reduce Madeira by half, add a cup of good brown sauce or demi-glace, and simmer until it coats a spoon. A reduced beef stock thickened lightly with a beurre manié will do; canned brown gravy will not.
- Beef palateThe roof of the ox's mouth, a common market item in the nineteenth century and effectively unavailable now. It contributed gelatinous chew rather than flavor. Blanched, diced beef tendon from an Asian grocer is the closest analogue; omitting it costs you texture but not much else.
- TrufflesTwo truffles here most likely means preserved black truffles from a tin, a milder thing than a fresh Périgord truffle. A tablespoon of chopped preserved truffle, or diced brown mushroom plus a few drops of truffle juice from the tin, keeps the dish honest. Truffle oil reads as artificial against Madeira.
- Artichoke bottomsCanned or jarred bottoms, drained and rinsed, are what most cooks will use and what the recipe explicitly permits. If you trim fresh ones, cook them in acidulated water until a knife slides in easily before cutting into six wedges.
- The hinge: keep it at a bare simmerTen minutes total is all the cooking there is, and it exists to marry flavors, not to soften anything. A hard boil breaks the sauce's gloss and shreds the artichoke wedges into pulp. Hold it just below a simmer and stir with a spoon rather than a whisk.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified, presumably because the Madeira sauce was expected to carry it. Taste at the end; canned artichokes and mushrooms both dilute, and the mixture usually wants salt and a turn of pepper.
- ServingSpoon it hot over sliced roast beef or filet, or into baked pastry cases. It does not hold well — the artichoke dulls and the sauce loses its gloss if it sits on the stove.
Oscar Tschirky's book catalogues the standard garnitures of the late-nineteenth-century French kitchen, the fixed combinations that let a chef write a menu in shorthand: name the garnish and the cooks knew the mise en place. Artichoke bottoms, mushrooms, truffles and Madeira are the recurring quartet of that vocabulary, and beef palate — cheap, gelatinous, and a butcher's offcut — turns up constantly in period garnishes and ragoûts before falling out of the trade in the twentieth century. Madeira held its place in professional sauce work partly for flavor and partly for practicality: fortified and heat-stable, it survived long storage in a hot kitchen where table wine would not. The Waldorf, which opened in 1893 and where Tschirky presided over the dining rooms, was built to serve exactly this kind of cooking to Americans who wanted to eat as Parisians did, which is why a book aimed at least partly at home readers still assumes a cook can lay hands on a tin of truffles and an ox palate.