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Parisian Garnish
This consists of Madeira, mushrooms and truffles prepared as follows: Put half a wineglassful of Madeira into a saucepan with six sliced mushrooms and three sliced truffles and cook for four minutes; then add a breakfast cupful of Madeira sauce, cook for five minutes longer, and use as required.
A compound garnish in the French sense — a finished mushroom-and-truffle ragout in Madeira sauce, spooned over cutlets, tournedos, sweetbreads or poached eggs. It is only as good as the Madeira sauce underneath it, which the book assumes you already have.
- WineglassfulA wineglass in this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so half a glass is roughly 1 fl oz (2 tablespoons). Four minutes over heat will take some of it off, though the mushrooms release water as they cook.
- Breakfast cupfulLarger than a modern measuring cup: reckon 8 to 10 fl oz. Start at 8 oz and judge by how well it coats the mushrooms.
- Madeira sauceIn classical usage this is not wine thickened with flour but a brown sauce — demi-glace or a reduced veal stock sauce — finished with Madeira, and that is almost certainly what is intended here; the book gives its own version elsewhere. A good jarred demi-glace, thinned and laced with Madeira off the heat, is the practical substitute.
- The hingeAdd the Madeira sauce only after the wine has had its four minutes with the mushrooms and truffles; the sequence is explicit in the recipe, and the initial cooking takes the edge off the raw wine.
- TrufflesTruffles were used more freely in hotel kitchens of this period than they are now, though never cheap. Fresh black truffle at current prices makes this an extravagance; a small jar of truffle peelings with their juice, added at the end, is the honest modern equivalent. Truffle oil behaves differently and does not hold up well to heat.
- MushroomsThe recipe says only six, sliced; cultivated button mushrooms are the likely intent. Cremini give more colour in a brown sauce. They release water, so let it cook off rather than adding the sauce over a wet pan.
- Second cookingFive minutes with the sauce is enough to marry the flavours and no more. Longer reduction dulls the Madeira, which is the point of the garnish; if you must hold it, add a splash of Madeira before serving.
- YieldRather more than a cup of finished garnish, given the breakfast cupful of sauce plus the mushrooms and truffles.
In classical kitchen language a garniture is a named, repeatable assembly that identifies a dish on the menu, and "à la parisienne" was one of dozens of such tags a chef could deploy without further explanation. Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, published his book in 1896; the master sauces appear elsewhere in the volume, and pages like this one simply tell the cook how to combine them. The trio of Madeira, mushrooms and truffles was standard in late nineteenth-century hotel cooking; what varies is the proportion and the base sauce. That truffles are called for casually, without comment on cost, is a fair measure of how differently the ingredient sat in a large commercial kitchen of the period than it does now.