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Partridge Cutlets
Bone and skin some partridges, shape them like cutlets, cut them across in thin slices, mask them with a few cooked poultry livers that have been pounded into a paste, and then cover this with brown chaudfroid sauce; arrange them side by side on a bakingsheet and bake. When done glaze them with aspic jelly, and as soon as the jelly has set trim off the superfluous sauce and fasten paper ruffles round the bones. Put in the center of the dish some small-glazed truffles, arrange the cutlets round them, finish with a chain of small aspic jelly croutons round the cutlets, and serve.
This is a cold buffet showpiece from the era when the Waldorf's larder turned out lacquered platters for late suppers, and it assumes a kitchen with stock, aspic and chaudfroid already standing by. Read it as an assembly method rather than a cooking method.
- The instruction that matters mostChaudfroid sauce is applied to cold cooked meat and set by chilling; it will slump and break if warmed. The direction to "bake" the coated cutlets is hard to reconcile with that, and may be a condensed or garbled instruction. Bake the birds first, cool them thoroughly, then coat and chill.
- Cook the birds before coatingThe recipe's only cooking direction ("bake") comes after the coating stage, and it gives no instruction for cooking the birds beforehand. Roast or poach the breasts to 165F and chill them completely before slicing; nothing after the coating stage reliably brings the meat up to temperature.
- Chaudfroid sauceBrown chaudfroid is a well-reduced demi-glace or game espagnole with dissolved gelatin (or a very gelatinous reduced stock) stirred in. Use it at about 85-90F, when it coats a spoon thickly but still flows, and work quickly over a bowl of ice water.
- Aspic jelly and croutonsThe glaze is clarified stock set with gelatin, brushed on in two thin coats once the chaudfroid is firm. "Aspic croutons" are not bread: pour a shallow layer of jelly into a tray, chill it hard, and cut it into small diamonds or cubes.
- Partridge todayWild game birds generally cannot be sold in the United States, so buy farmed partridge (about 12-14 oz each) or substitute quail or a small chicken breast. If using a bird taken by shot, check carefully for pellets before slicing.
- Poultry liversChicken livers work in place of the game livers. Sauté them through, pound or process to a smooth paste with a little butter and a spoon of the reduced sauce, and season firmly; the paste is the flavor of the dish and is easy to underseason.
- Truffles and ruffles"Small-glazed truffles" are whole or turned truffles brushed with aspic. A high-quality truffle paste or preserved truffle slices give the visual effect at a fraction of the cost. Paper cutlet frills are still sold for lamb chops; here they cover the trimmed edge at whatever bone is left in as a handle.
- YieldTwo or three cutlets per bird, so figure four partridges for a first course for six to eight. The dish is served cold, at the table, and should not sit out more than two hours.
Chaud-froid — literally "hot-cold," a sauce made hot and eaten cold — belongs to the nineteenth-century grande cuisine of Carême and Escoffier, and its invention is traditionally traced to an eighteenth-century French household where a supper was interrupted and the sauced dish eaten cold instead; the story is repeated more often than it is documented. What is certain is that by the 1890s such glazed, mirror-finished cold pieces were the measure of a hotel larder's skill, and Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) records dozens of them from the Waldorf's own kitchen. Partridge signals the autumn game season, when European birds arrived hung and the cold buffet at a ball or late supper was expected to show something feathered under aspic. The technique survived into mid-twentieth-century hotel work and then largely died with the cold-buffet tradition itself, less because it tasted poor than because it demanded a cook with time, gelatinous stock and a cold room.