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Stewed Partridges
Procure three partridges, old ones will do, lard them, and truss them as for boiling. Line a stewpan with slices of fat bacon, put in the partridges, breasts down-wards, with a slice of lean veal, a bunch of sweet herbs, and a few chopped savory vegetables; pour in a teacupful each of gravy and white wine. Let all cook over a slow fire for an hour and a half; then place the partridges on a hot dish, strain their cooking liquor over them, garnish with cut lemons and fried parsley, and serve.
Stewed Partridges, Chipolata Cut a partridge into quarters, put it into a pan with butter, and fry it until brown, dusting it over with flour. Put in two dozen small onions, one-half pound of sausages cut into thin slices and fried, six chopped mushrooms, and twelve roasted chestnuts; add seasoning to taste, pour in two or three wineglassfuls of white wine, and stew till all is tender. Thicken the sauce, turn the whole onto a dish, and serve with croutons of fried bread. Stewed Partridges, Montmorency Truss some young partridges as for stewed partridges, Spanish style. Dip the breasts into boiling water to make them firm, then plunge them into cold water, and lard them with bacon. Put some slices of fat bacon at the bottom of the stewpan, put the partridges in, put some more rashers of fat bacon on the top of them, and moisten to half their height with fowl broth. Stand the pan over a brisk fire for a few minutes, then move to the side and cook slowly for twenty minutes. Glaze, take them out, drain, and glaze again. Put them on a hot dish, and serve with a Dutch sauce.
Stewed Partridges, Spanish Style Pluck two or three partridges carefully so as not to injure the skin, clean them, cut off the sinew that is under the joints of the legs, and skewer the legs up towards the breast. Fill a needle with packthread, run it through the stump of the right wing, then through the thick joint of the leg, next across the body, and then again through the other stump; then tighten the packthread and fasten the knot. Run the needle through from the back to the side beneath the leg, and then above the pinion below the breast, so as to perforate the breast bone, let the needle come out from the part parallel to that where it was first introduced, then through the side to the back, and then fasten the packthread. Care should be taken to give the birds as nice a shape as possible. Put some slices of bacon at the bottom of a large stewpan, put the partridges in, cover them with more bacon, pour in some rich fowl broth, cover, and cook for twenty minutes over a slow fire. When done drain them, place on a hot dish, pour over some Spanish sauce in which has been mixed a little glaze, and serve.
How to Truss Pheasants, Etc Pheasants are trussed in the same manner as fowls, and so are partridges and grouse, with the exception that, like all small wild fowl, the legs are crossed and the heads skinned and threaded on skewers through the pinions; pigeons and other birds of a similar size are trussed in such a manner as to make the breasts plump out.
Snipe and woodcock are trussed in France by thrusting the long beak through the body and fastening the wings under the thighs; woodcocks are sometimes trussed with the head "hooded," as it is called, under the skin of the breast.
Four related treatments of one bird, written for a brigade kitchen with a stockpot always going and a larding needle in the drawer. The useful core is the method: fat bacon above and below, a shallow moistening, and slow gentle heat.
- The hinge: old birds versus youngThe first recipe explicitly permits old birds and gives them ninety minutes; the Montmorency version calls for young birds, and both it and the Spanish version stop at twenty minutes (the Spanish recipe does not itself state the age of the bird). Match the time to the bird or you will either serve it raw or dry it to sawdust. Farmed partridge sold today is generally young — treat it as the twenty-minute bird, and check that the thigh juices run clear.
- What the birds should beWild-shot partridge cannot legally be sold in the United States, so buy farmed red-legged or chukar partridge, roughly 12–16 oz each and serving one person. Two quail or a poussin substitute reasonably for one bird, with the times shortened accordingly.
- Teacupful and wineglassfulNineteenth-century teacupfuls are variously reckoned at about 4 to 6 fl oz, so figure roughly half to three-quarters of a cup each of gravy and wine. A wineglassful is usually taken as about 2 fl oz, making the chipolata's "two or three wineglassfuls" about half to three-quarters of a cup.
- "Gravy" is not gravyIn a nineteenth-century professional kitchen gravy means a strong brown stock, not a thickened sauce. Use a good veal or game stock. The "fowl broth" of the later recipes is chicken stock, and the slice of lean veal in the first recipe is there to enrich the liquor, not to be served.
- Larding and the bacon liningLarding threads strips of pork fat through the lean breast with a needle; barding — tying thin sheets of fatback or unsmoked streaky bacon over the breast — achieves nearly the same protection with less fuss. Use unsmoked fat bacon or pancetta, since modern heavily smoked bacon will dominate the sauce.
- GlazeTo glaze means to brush with glace de viande, stock reduced to a syrup, and let it set to a shine. Reduce a cup of strong brown stock to a couple of tablespoons, or buy demi-glace and reduce it further.
- The named saucesDutch sauce is hollandaise. Spanish sauce is espagnole, the brown mother sauce; a spoonful of glaze stirred in is standard finishing. Neither is made in the recipe, which assumes both are standing ready on the stove.
- Chipolata is a garnish, not a sausageChipolata is the name of the garnish -- Chipolata names the whole assembly here — glazed button onions, sliced sausage, mushrooms and chestnuts — as well as being the name of a small sausage. Use small pork sausages without heavy seasoning, and vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts in place of roasting your own.
- Heat and vessel"A brisk fire" is a hard burner to get the pan moving; "the side" of the range is the low, gentle spot, no more than a bare simmer. A heavy lidded braiser on the lowest burner setting, or a low oven, reproduces it.
- ServingThree partridges serve three to four; the quartered bird in the chipolata serves two. Fried parsley means whole sprigs dropped briefly into hot fat until crisp and dark green — dry them thoroughly first, as wet parsley will spit.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf — he was the maître d'hôtel — but the 1896 Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf gathered the hotel's working repertoire into nine hundred pages of French service adapted for American money. Game birds sat near the top of that repertoire: partridge, grouse, canvasback and woodcock were the luxury proteins of the Gilded Age table, bought from market gunners who supplied restaurants freely before the Lacey Act of 1900 barred interstate traffic in illegally taken game, and before a longer sequence of state laws and then the Migratory Bird Treaty Act — which covered canvasback and woodcock, though never partridge or grouse — brought the market-gunning trade to an end. The garnish names here are pure Carême-descended classicism, learned by rote in every hotel kitchen: chipolata for the onion-chestnut-sausage assembly, espagnole for the brown sauce, hollandaise anglicised as Dutch sauce. The long trussing instructions with needle and packthread are a reminder of what the entry expected of its reader — birds arrived whole and feathered, and a cook was judged on shape as much as flavour.