Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Puree of Partridge
Puree of Partridge
Empty and clean three partidges, put them in a braisingpan with a little game broth and braise them. When done let them cool. Strain the cooking liquor through a fine hair-sieve, skim off all the fat, put it in a stewpan with double its quantity of veloute sauce and boil till reduced to the thickness of thick supreme sauce. Take all the meat from the partridges when cold, chop it, put it in a mortar and pound, pouring on at the same time the sauce. Pass the puree through a fine hair-sieve and it is then ready for use.
A classic forcemeat-style purée meant as a component — for stuffing vol-au-vents and croustades, spreading on canapés, or thinning into potage of game. Oscar assumes you already have game broth and velouté on hand, so the work begins before the recipe does.
- Velouté firstVeloute first -- Veloute is a white stock (here veal or chicken) thickened with a blond roux and simmered until it coats a spoon. You need roughly twice the volume of your strained braising liquor; the recipe calls only for 'a little' broth, so the quantity is yours to judge before you start braising.
- The braiseThree partridges in a covered pan with just enough game broth to moisten, at a bare simmer, run 35-45 minutes for young birds. Older ones need an hour or more. The birds should be fully cooked but not dried out — the meat has to pound smoothly.
- Reducing the sauce"The thickness of thick suprême" means it should heavily coat the back of a spoon and hold a line when you draw a finger through it. This is the hinge: too thin and the purée will not hold together in a pastry case, too thick and it will not pass the sieve.
- Mortar or processorA food processor does in a minute what the mortar does in fifteen. Add the sauce in stages while the machine runs, exactly as Oscar directs, so the meat emulsifies rather than seizing into a paste.
- Hair sieveA drum sieve of woven horsehair, once standard in professional kitchens. A fine-mesh conical strainer works, but the purée must be forced through with a stiff plastic scraper or the back of a ladle — it will not drip.
- Sinew and skinPick the meat carefully. Partridge legs carry tendon that is slow to break down and can clog the sieve, and skin left in may dull the colour of the puree. The recipe says to take all the meat; breast and thigh only will give a cleaner result.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none, presumably on the assumption that the broth and veloute are already seasoned. Taste and correct with salt and white pepper before sieving, when you can still adjust texture.
- YieldThree partridges give something under a pound of picked meat; the quantity of finished puree depends on how much braising liquor you have to reduce, which the recipe does not specify.
- Sourcing birdsFarmed partridge is sold frozen by game dealers and some butchers. Two small quail or one guinea fowl leg-and-breast set substitute reasonably; ordinary chicken makes a blander purée that loses the point of the dish.
Purées of game like this one sit at the foundation of the classical repertoire Oscar Tschirky brought to the Waldorf: a mother sauce built into a component, held in the cold room, and pressed into service across many menu items. The technique is generally traced to Carême — pound, bind with velouté, pass through the tammy or hair sieve — and the labour it represents was only possible in a brigade kitchen with a garde-manger and apprentices to do the pounding. Partridge appears constantly in American hotel cookery of the 1890s because game was still a commercial commodity; market gunners supplied city hotels with wild birds by the barrel until the Lacey Act of 1900, which barred interstate transport of illegally taken wildlife, and the state laws and later federal legislation that progressively curtailed the commercial traffic.