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Rouennese Garnish
This garnish is composed of turnips seasoned and cooked with Spanish sauce as follows: Cut three turnips into six pieces each with a vegetable cutter, put them in a sautepan with one ounce of butter, sprinkle over a little powdered sugar, put on the lid, and cook in the oven for ten minutes, shaking the pan frequently. Moisten with one pint of Spanish sauce, add salt and pepper to taste, cook for twenty minutes longer, skim off the fat and use when required. Smelts as Garnish Clean and draw the smelts, fasten the tails in the openings at the gills with small wooden skewers so as to form rings, dip them in beaten egg and then in finely-grated breadcrumb, put them in a frying-basket and then plunge them into boiling fat. When nicely browned, drain the fish, remove the skewers and they will retain their ring shape.
Two plate garnishes from the Waldorf's service kitchen, both meant to finish a roast rather than stand alone. Oscar assumes a brigade that already has Spanish sauce on the stove and a fry kettle at temperature.
- Spanish sauceThis is sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce built on a dark roux, brown stock and mirepoix, reduced for hours. A pint is two cups. A good reduced brown veal stock, lightly thickened, stands in for it without much loss.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the book gives none anywhere. A moderate oven, in the region of 375F, suits the covered turnips for the first ten minutes; the sauced pan can then be held at a bare simmer, on the stovetop if easier, for the remaining twenty.
- The vegetable cutter"Cut three turnips into six pieces each with a vegetable cutter" means shaping them, not merely quartering: a channel knife or small oval cutter to produce even olive or barrel shapes that cook at the same rate. Trimming them by hand with a paring knife gives the same result.
- The sugar is not sweeteningA sprinkle of powdered sugar with the butter under a lid is a glaze, and it also blunts the sulphurous edge of turnip. Use a scant teaspoon for three turnips; more and the sauce turns cloying against the espagnole.
- SkimmingThe fat that rises after twenty minutes of simmering is the ounce of butter plus whatever the sauce carries. Skim it or the garnish reads greasy on the plate. Tilting the pan and drawing the fat to one side is quicker than a ladle.
- SmeltsWhole smelts, three to five inches, are still sold frozen at fish markets and in Asian and Eastern European groceries. "Draw" means gut them; leave heads on, since the gill opening is what anchors the tail.
- Frying temperature"Boiling fat" for breaded fish means 350 to 375F. Below that the crumb soaks; above it, the coating colors before the fish sets. Fry in batches of six or eight so the fat does not crash.
- The skewersSmall wooden skewers or toothpicks hold the ring while the egg-and-crumb coating sets in the fat. Pull them the moment the fish comes out, while the crust is still pliable, or it cracks.
- YieldThree turnips garnish four to six plates. Allow one or two smelt rings per person; they are a border for a fish course or a roast, not a portion.
Garnishes in this book are shorthand: a cook who read "rouennaise" on a menu knew what came with the dish and needed only the working method. The name points to Rouen in Normandy, whose ducklings were among the most famous in France, and turnips and duck are an old Normandy pairing, as in the homelier canard aux navets. Oscar's version formalizes the turnips for hotel service: turned to a uniform shape, glazed with butter and sugar, then finished in espagnole so they can hold on the stove through a long dinner. The smelts belong to a different habit of the period, when small fried fish were arranged as an edible border around a platter; bending them into rings by fixing the tail at the gill was common garde-manger work, and a related trick appears under names like merlan en colère for whiting. Both entries show a kitchen where the plate was composed as much for the eye of the dining room as for the palate.