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Stewed Endive with Cream Sauce
Take three large heads of endive and clean thoroughly; cut off all the outer green leaves and wash the endive in several waters. Drain and blanch them in boiling salted water for ten minutes. Remove, cool in cold water then take them out and press out the water; chop up, place in a saucepan with four ounces of butter and cook for a quarter of an hour, until dry. Pour over two wineglassfuls of cream or milk, a very little at time, reduce, and grate in a little nutmeg, adding salt and pepper to taste. Stir well and leave on the fire for five minutes, turn it out on a hot dish, and serve with croutons of fried bread for a garnish.
Green Peas, Ancient Style Take three quarts of young, tender green peas, shell them carefully, and keep them wrapped up in a wet cloth till wanted. Clean, drain, and tie up a lettuce head, put it in a saucepan with the peas, add a little salt, cover with a wineglassful of water, and add four ounces of butter. After cooking for fifteen minutes, remove the lettuce, and when ready to serve, thicken the peas with three tablespoonfuls of cream, diluted with the yolk of an egg, adding a very little white pepper, and a tablespoonful of powdered loaf sugar. Let all thicken together for five minutes, and serve at once in a vegetable dish.
Two side dishes run together on one page. Both are French vegetable cookery of the 1890s, heavy on butter and finished off the boil; the measures are the ones needing translation.
- Which endiveIn Oscar's kitchen "endive" with outer green leaves to trim means curly endive or escarole, not the pale Belgian chicon. Three large heads is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb untrimmed, cooking down to about 2 cups chopped.
- WineglassfulTake it as 2 fl oz, a scant 1/4 cup. Two wineglassfuls of cream is about 1/2 cup, added a spoonful at a time so it reduces into the greens rather than pooling.
- ButterFour ounces is one stick, and it is not a misprint in either recipe. Half that amount makes both dishes perfectly good if you want them lighter; the endive in particular will still dry out properly.
- The quarter hour of dryingThat fifteen minutes in butter is the point of the dish, not a delay. Blanched greens hold a great deal of water, and until it has cooked off the cream will thin out instead of clinging. Keep the heat moderate and stir.
- Peas by volumeThree quarts of peas in the pod shell out to roughly 3 to 4 cups, about 1 to 1 1/4 lb shelled. Frozen petits pois work and need only a few minutes, not fifteen.
- The lettuceA tied head of lettuce, cooked with the peas and then lifted out, is a flavouring and a moisture source in the old French manner. Use a whole head of Boston or butter lettuce, tied with string so it comes out in one piece.
- Egg yolk liaisonCream diluted with a yolk must not boil. Pull the pan to low heat, stir the mixture in, and hold it below a simmer for the five minutes given or the yolk will scramble into threads.
- Powdered loaf sugarLoaf sugar was a hard cone of refined sugar, scraped or pounded to a powder. Superfine (caster) sugar is the direct equivalent; a tablespoonful in that quantity of peas reads as seasoning, not sweetness.
- YieldEach dish serves four as a vegetable course alongside a roast.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms rather than its stoves, but the book he put his name to in 1896 records the classical French repertoire the hotel's kitchens worked from, and these two dishes are textbook examples. Petits pois à l'ancienne — peas braised in almost no water with butter and a head of lettuce, then bound with cream and yolk — is a close relative of the petits pois à la française still found in French manuals, and the lettuce is usually explained as giving up its own liquid as it wilts, letting the peas steam in something closer to their own juices. The buttered endive belongs to the same family of blanched, buttered greens, in which a bitter green is blanched to tame it, then cooked dry in butter and enriched with cream and nutmeg. Fried bread croutons were a common nineteenth-century garnish for soft, spoonable dishes.