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Toulouse Garnish
This is made of goose's fat liver, mushrooms, sweetbreads, sheep's kidneys and truffles, prepared as follows: Cut some slices from a cooked goose's fat liver, having them of uniform size and shape; keep them hot over the fire in a buttered sautepan, and before using, slightly glaze them. Cook some mushrooms in butter and lemon juice, braise some sweetbreads, and poach (or cook in water) some sheep's kidneys, masking all of them, when ready, with veloute sauce. Trim some truffles as round as possible; boil them in wine and a small quantity of meat or fowl glaze, and afterwards brush them over with butter. A tureenful of Toulouse sauce should accompany.
This is not a dish but a garniture — a set of five separately cooked components assembled around a main item, in the grand-hotel style Oscar worked in. Read it as five short recipes plus a sauce, and plan the order backwards from the moment of plating.
- What it garnishesA Toulouse garnish traditionally fills a vol-au-vent case or surrounds a poached chicken or braised sweetbread. The original assumes you already have the centrepiece; nothing here is meant to be eaten alone.
- Goose's fat liverThis is foie gras, already cooked — a terrine or torchon, not raw liver. Slice it to uniform size as directed, warm it briefly in a buttered pan, and glaze it with a spoon of reduced stock. The original does tell you to hold the slices hot over the fire, but foie gras loosens into fat with prolonged heat, so keep that holding stage as short as the service allows.
- Sheep's kidneysSold today as lamb kidneys. Halve them, strip the white core and the membrane, and soak in cold water or milk before cooking. "Poach" here means gentle, brief cooking in barely simmering liquid; kidneys turn grainy and metallic if held at a boil or carried past firm.
- SweetbreadsBuy veal sweetbreads, soak them several hours in cold water with a few changes, blanch, then peel off the outer membrane and press between two plates under a weight until cold. Only then braise. Skipping the pressing gives a shapeless, spongy result.
- Mushrooms "in butter and lemon juice"This is cooking à blanc — a covered pan with butter, a squeeze of lemon and a little water, so the caps stay pale rather than browning. Small button mushrooms, whole, are correct for the period.
- Masking with veloutéTo mask is to coat, not to submerge. A velouté is a white roux slackened with veal or chicken stock and cooked until it coats a spoon; it should cling to each component in a thin, glossy film.
- Glaze"Meat or fowl glaze" is glace de viande — stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A teaspoon dissolved in the truffle wine does the work; commercial demi-glace concentrate is the practical stand-in.
- TrufflesTrimming them round was a matter of nineteenth-century plate symmetry and wastes a great deal of an expensive ingredient. Sliced truffle delivers the same aroma; the wine-and-glaze simmer is worth keeping.
- Toulouse sauceThe accompanying sauce is a velouté enriched with egg yolk and cream and flavoured with mushroom and truffle cooking liquor — essentially an allemande. Send it separately in a warmed sauceboat as directed, since the coated garnish is already sauced.
The name is traditionally linked to Toulouse and the goose-fattening country of south-west France, and the garnish is built around fattened goose liver — though that connection is customary rather than documented. In the classical repertoire codified by Escoffier and his contemporaries, a garniture was a fixed formula — name the garnish and a trained kitchen knew the components without being told. The combination of foie gras, sweetbreads, kidneys, mushrooms and truffles bound in a white sauce is generally associated with vol-au-vent and with poached chicken à la Toulouse. That such a list appears in a Waldorf cookbook at the turn of the twentieth century says much about the hotel's ambitions: a brigade large enough to keep five separate preparations hot at once, and a clientele that expected French nomenclature on the menu card.