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Salmon Bouchees
Prepare some bouchee cases, and fill them with a paste made of pounded cold salmon, seasoned and moistened with lobster sauce.
This is a Waldorf service note rather than a full recipe: Oscar assumes his kitchen already has puff pastry cases and a lobster sauce on hand. The scale and seasoning are left to the cook, so the working out is all in the details.
- What a bouchée case isA bouchée is a small round of puff pastry cut and baked with a raised rim, then hollowed to leave a shell — a miniature vol-au-vent, about 1.5 to 2 inches across. Frozen all-butter puff pastry works; bake at 400F until fully risen and dry inside, or the pastry will collapse under a moist filling.
- Lobster sauce, 1896 senseNot the thickened Cantonese sauce of the same name. In period Anglo-French kitchens this was generally a white fish sauce or thin béchamel finished with lobster butter and often the pounded coral, which gives both the pink colour and much of the flavour. A few spoonfuls is all the filling needs.
- Pounding without a mortar"Pounded" meant mortar and pestle to a paste. A food processor does it in seconds, but pulse rather than run it — salmon overworked goes gluey and pasty. Some cooks prefer to flake by hand and mash with a fork for a coarser texture.
- The moisture hingeAdd the sauce a spoonful at a time. The paste should hold a soft peak, not slump; too loose and it weeps into the pastry within minutes. This is the one thing that decides whether the bouchées eat crisp or soggy.
- SeasoningThe text says only 'seasoned' and leaves it to the cook. Period practice with fish generally favoured salt and cayenne rather than black pepper, with lemon, and anchovy essence was a common addition. Cold fish paste needs noticeably more salt and acid than it does warm.
- Fill at the last momentBake the cases ahead and re-crisp them for a few minutes in a 350F oven, but fill only as they go out. Filled cases left standing an hour are limp.
- Quantities and yieldRoughly 8 oz of cooked salmon with 3 to 4 tablespoons of sauce fills about 24 small cases — enough for a dozen people as one item among several hors d'oeuvre.
Bouchée is simply French for "mouthful," and the little raised puff-pastry case is often said to have been scaled down from the vol-au-vent for service as an hors d'oeuvre, though the accounts vary and the bouchée à la reine is conventionally traced to the eighteenth century. By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the dining rooms of the Waldorf in the 1890s, such cases were standard equipment in a large American hotel kitchen, filled with whatever cold cooked fish, poultry or game the larder held. That is the real subject of this entry — not a dish invented for the occasion, but a method for using yesterday's poached salmon at a level of finish a hotel could charge for. Salmon and lobster sauce were a long-standing pairing in Anglo-French cookery, and the coral in the sauce supplied a pink tint. The brevity of the instruction is itself period evidence: Oscar was writing for cooks who already knew how to make both components.