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Roasted Partridges
Pluck the partridges, draw and truss them, and fasten some thin slices of fat bacon round them, roast for fifteen minutes in a hot oven. Five minutes before dishing take the bacon off, sprinkle a little salt over the birds, and brown them. Put the partridges on a hot dish, and serve them with a sauceboatful of brown gravy.
Roasted Partridge, Perigord Pluck, singe, and draw three partridges. Put four ounces of scraped fat bacon in a stewpan with three bay leaves, a blade of mace, and two or three cloves, and place over the fire till boiling; then take out the bay leaves, cloves and mace. Finely chop three large truffles, put them in with the fat, also put in ten sliced truffles, pour in one quart of white sauce, and boil it until thickly reduced, keeping it well stirred at the same time. Move the pan to the side of the fire, stir in quickly the beaten yolks of two eggs, and pour it on the plate. When the truffle mixture is cold, stuff the partridges with it, then hang them up and leave them for a few days, so as to be well flavored with the truffles. When ready for cooking, wrap the birds separately in sheets of buttered paper, fix them on a roasting pan and roast them in a hot oven for half an hour. Pour two quarts of white sauce into a saucepan with one pint of veal broth, put it over the fire, and when it boils add a few thinly-sliced French truffles, and a scant teaspoonful of sugar. Stir and boil it until thickly reduced, then mix in two tablespoonfuls of whipped cream. When cooked take the birds out of the sheets of paper, put them on a hot dish, pour the sauce over them, and serve while very hot.
Roasted Partridges Stuffed with Truffles Singe and draw two young red partridges. Peel six black truffles, cut them in quarters and sprinkle salt and pepper over them. Chop the livers of the partridges that have been cooked with two chickens' livers, an equal quantity of fat bacon and the trimmings of the truffles; put the mince in a mortar, pound it and pass it through a fine hair-sieve. Put some bacon fat in a fryingpan, and when melted put in the truffles; toss them about over the fire for two or three minutes, then mix them with the forcemeat and stuff the partridges with it; truss, lay them in a roastingpan, spread with butter and set the pan in the oven, basting the birds occasionally with their own butter. When the birds are cooked (they will take from twenty to twenty-five minutes, according to their size), sprinkle salt over and put them on a hot dish. Mix a little gravy in the drippings, skim off the fat, and boil it till reduced to half its original quantity, then strain it through a fine hair-sieve. Garnish the partridges with slices of lemon, and serve them with the sauce in a sauceboat.
Three treatments of partridge from Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen: a plain barded roast, the elaborate Périgord version, and a truffle-stuffed roast. The plain and the truffle-stuffed birds are workable; the Périgord method is not, for the reason given first.
- The Périgord bird cannot be madeThe Perigord bird cannot be made safely as written -- It directs you to stuff the birds with a cooked, egg-yolk-thickened truffle sauce and then hang them for several days so the flavour penetrates. That is a moist, low-acid, egg-and-dairy filling held inside a raw bird at ambient temperature for days -- good conditions for salmonella and for staphylococcal growth, and staphylococcal toxin, once formed, is not destroyed by half an hour of roasting. Game birds were traditionally hung unstuffed and undrawn in cold air; stuffing changes the situation entirely. Use a current recipe if you want a truffled partridge.
- Oven temperaturesA "hot oven" in this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. The plain birds go in at that heat for fifteen minutes; the truffle-stuffed birds, twenty to twenty-five.
- DonenessFifteen minutes at high heat leaves a partridge distinctly pink, which is how it was and still is served in classical kitchens. Current guidance for poultry is 165F in the breast; for that, expect closer to twenty-five minutes and a drier bird. Stuffed birds should be judged on the stuffing, not the breast.
- Barding"Thin slices of fat bacon" means unsmoked fatback or fat salt pork, not modern smoked streaky bacon, which will overwhelm the bird. Ask a butcher for barding fat or use thinly sliced pork fatback. "Scraped fat bacon" is fat pounded or scraped to a paste.
- White sauceOscar's white sauce here is most likely a veloute -- a light roux let down with veal or chicken stock -- rather than a milk bechamel; the veal broth stirred into it later points that way. A quart reduced until thick might yield around a cup and a half.
- Buttered paperSubstitute buttered parchment. Modern baking paper does the same job of shielding the skin while the bird cooks through.
- Hair sieve and mortarA fine-mesh conical strainer or tamis replaces the hair sieve; a food processor will do the liver forcemeat, though it gives a looser texture than pounding.
- A garbled line"The livers of the partridges that have been cooked with two chickens' livers" reads as garbled. The likeliest sense is: chop the partridge livers together with two chicken livers, an equal weight of fat bacon, and the truffle trimmings.
- Birds and yield"Red partridge" is the red-legged or French partridge. A dressed red-leg runs roughly 12-16 oz and serves one; grey partridge is smaller, nearer 8-12 oz. Grey partridge or quail can stand in; quail need roughly half the time.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his Cook Book in 1896, and its game chapters read like a direct transcription of the French repertoire that governed American hotel dining at the turn of the century. Partridge belonged to a class of birds that arrived at the Waldorf through the game markets — Fulton and Washington Market in New York handled quantities of wild birds before the Lacey Act of 1900 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 closed most commercial traffic in wild game. The Périgord treatment takes its name from the truffle country of southwestern France, and the practice of truffling a bird days before cooking so the aroma migrates into the flesh is a genuine old French technique, described in period manuals for turkeys and pheasants as well; the classic dinde truffée was truffled by packing the cavity with truffles and fat and holding the bird cold for two or three days, which differs from Oscar's method less in the placement of the truffles than in the cold larder and the absence of a cooked egg-and-dairy sauce. What the page really records is a kitchen with unlimited labour: three separate reductions, a mortar, a hair sieve, and a cellar in which birds could be left to ripen.