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Stuffed Truffles
Wash thoroughly in warm water a dozen large truffles, place them in a saucepan with sufficient white wine to cover them, and cook. Remove, drain, cut them with a cutter, scoop out the insides, fill them with cooked forcemeat, place them in the oven, warm them up, and serve on a napkin spread over a warm dish.
A garnish from the era when truffles were bought by the pound and treated as a vegetable. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what forcemeat is and has a stockpot going; everything else here is filling in those gaps.
- What this actually isThe recipe's own direction, to serve them on a napkin over a warm dish, suggests they went out in their own right; stuffed truffles of this kind were also used as a garnish around a roast or poached poultry. The text gives no number of servings.
- Truffles then and nowThe recipe presumably means whole truffles large enough to hollow out; black truffles reached New York hotel kitchens fresh in season and in tins otherwise. A dozen truffles of that size would be very costly today. Preserved whole truffles in tins or jars are the practical substitute, and they are already cooked — you can skip the wine simmering and go straight to hollowing and filling.
- "Cook" in white wineFor fresh truffles this is a gentle simmer, covered, roughly 20 to 30 minutes depending on size, until a skewer meets no resistance. Do not let it boil hard; the aroma leaves with the steam.
- Save the wineThe cooking liquid is now carrying truffle flavour and is worth reducing into the sauce that goes with whatever the truffles accompany. The recipe itself says nothing about what to do with it.
- "Cut them with a cutter"A small round pastry or vegetable cutter, pressed in so the inside can be scooped out with a small spoon or melon baller. If you take off a disc as a lid, it can be set back on after filling, though the recipe does not say to.
- The forcemeatPeriod forcemeat here means a fine-textured stuffing — chicken or veal pounded with panada and cream, or a gratin forcemeat of liver and fat — cooked before it goes in, since the truffles are only warmed. Chop the scooped-out truffle interiors into it rather than discarding them.
- "Warm them up"The book gives no temperature or time; a moderate oven, just long enough to heat through, is all this needs. Both components are already cooked, so the step is only about temperature, and longer drying in the oven costs the aroma.
- The napkinA folded linen napkin on a warmed platter absorbs residual moisture so the truffles do not sit in a puddle. Napkin service of this sort was common for drained and fried or boiled items, and it still works.
Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, and his 1896 Cook Book collects the working repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen at the height of French influence — a repertoire in which the black truffle of Périgord was a standard building block, not an event. Truffles arrived in New York fresh in season and in tins the rest of the year, and appeared as slices, as cut shapes for decorating chaud-froid, as dice in sauces, and, as here, hollowed and stuffed in the manner known as truffes farcies. The technique is a miniature of a much older European habit of using a vegetable as its own container, and it survives on this page mainly as evidence of how cheap and plentiful truffles once were.