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Regency Garnish
This consists of fish quenelles, truffles, crayfish tails, cock's kidneys and mushrooms, as follows: Prepare some large fish quenelles decorated with truffles, also some cocks' kidneys and crayfish tails. Cook some mushrooms, mask them with Regency sauce and glaze some whole truffles. Arrange in separate heaps around the dish.
This is not a dish but a compound garnish in the classical French manner, written for a brigade that already had quenelle forcemeat, glaze and sauce standing ready. Read it as an assembly list; every component is a recipe of its own elsewhere in the repertoire.
- What it garnishesA Régence garnish is set around a large poached or braised centrepiece, not eaten alone. This fish version belongs with a whole turbot, sole or salmon; the poultry version substitutes chicken quenelles and foie gras.
- Cocks' kidneysRognons de coq are not kidneys at all but rooster testicles, a standard nineteenth-century garnish, gently poached in a little white stock. They are effectively unobtainable at retail now. Omit them, or use small poached quenelles in their place.
- Regency sauceSauce Regence for fish is generally given as a normande (fish velouté) finished with a reduction of Rhine wine with mushroom and truffle essence. The poultry and meat version is built on allemande instead.
- QuenellesPike is the classic fish for the forcemeat; sole or whiting work. Panade, fish and cream must all stay cold, and the shaped quenelles are poached in barely trembling salted water — a rolling boil breaks them apart.
- Decorating with trufflesThe truffle decoration is applied to the raw quenelle as thin cut shapes before poaching, so it sets into the surface. Thin slices of black truffle, pressed on and lightly moistened, will stay put.
- Glazed trufflesTo glaze means to coat whole truffles in reduced meat or fish glaze until they shine, not to sugar them. Given the price of fresh truffle, a modern cook is more likely to use one small truffle sliced than several whole.
- Crayfish tailsCook the crayfish in a court-bouillon, shell the tails and keep them warm in a little butter. Freshwater crayfish are seasonal in most places; shell-on prawns are the usual stand-in, though the flavour is not the same.
- MushroomsSmall button mushrooms turned or left whole, cooked in a little water with lemon and butter, then masked with the sauce. Nineteenth-century kitchens kept the cooking liquor as mushroom essence for the sauce itself.
- Quantities and arrangementNo amounts are given because the garnish scales to the centrepiece. Figure roughly two quenelles, two crayfish tails and a small heap of mushrooms per diner, set in separate mounds around the platter rather than mixed.
Garnishes in classical French cooking were named, codified and repeated exactly, so that à la Régence on a menu told a cook precisely what to put on the plate. The name looks back to the French Regency of 1715-23, when Philippe d'Orléans governed for the child Louis XV — a period later associated with luxurious eating — though the garnish itself is a nineteenth-century construction of the grand-cuisine kitchens, and Escoffier records separate Régence garnishes for fish, poultry and sweetbreads. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, was not a trained chef but he was recording the working vocabulary of his own kitchen at the end of the 1890s, when a New York hotel dining room was expected to reproduce Parisian usage down to the truffle. The entry's brevity is the point: it assumes the reader already commands quenelle forcemeat, court-bouillon and velouté, and needs only to be told which of them go on the dish together.