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Truffled Chicken
Bone a fat chicken and put it on a table with the fillets cut off the breasts of two other fowls; cut some large slits in them all and put pieces of pork cut into thin slips in the cuts. Chop into slices one quart of truffles and put them where they will show in the white meat when it is cut; sprinkle well with pepper, salt and powdered thyme and a little finely grated nutmeg, and put the pieces of the breasts in the thinnest parts of the fowl, draw the two sides together, sew them up into shapes as near the original as possible, wrap the fowl in a cloth, tie it round with a string and boil it in salted broth for two hours. Take it out, put it in a mould with a weight on top and let it cool. When perfectly cold remove the string and cloth, put it on a dish and cut it up in slices; or, it may be put into a mould and filled up with aspic jelly, or masked with liquefied butter.
This is a galantine: a boned bird, stuffed and reshaped, poached in its cloth, then pressed and served cold in slices. The hinge is the wrapping and the pressing — if the roll is loosely tied it will poach into a shapeless mass and slice badly.
- Boning the birdBone the chicken out whole through the back, keeping the skin intact, so it opens flat as a rectangle of meat and skin. Wing tips and drumstick bones come out with the rest; the carcass and trimmings should go straight into the poaching broth.
- A quart of trufflesTaken literally that is roughly a pound or more of black truffle, a quantity that made sense in a hotel kitchen buying by the tin in 1896 and is now a several-hundred-dollar proposition. Two to four ounces of fresh or good jarred truffle, sliced and laid in lines so the cut face shows a pattern, gives much the same effect; truffle peelings plus a little of their juice stretch the flavour further.
- "Pieces of pork cut into thin slips"The recipe says only 'pork'; for larding this would most likely be fresh pork back fat or unsmoked fatback rather than bacon, since smoke would overwhelm the truffle. Cut batons about a quarter-inch square and push them into the slits so they run the length of the roll and show as white dots in the slice.
- WrappingRoll in a double layer of damp cheesecloth or a clean linen napkin and tie at one-inch intervals like a roast, firmly enough to compact the meat but not so tight the cloth cuts in. Some cooks now wrap tightly in plastic film first, then in cloth, which keeps the shape better and loses less juice.
- Poaching, not boilingHold the broth at a bare shiver, around 175F, rather than a rolling boil, which shreds the skin and squeezes the meat dry. Two hours suits a large roll; check with a probe through the cloth and take it off at 165F at the centre, which for a 5-6 lb bird will often come sooner than the stated time.
- Cooling and pressingCool the roll in the poaching liquid to blood heat, then press it under a weighted board or in a mould and refrigerate promptly — this is a cooked meat that will sit in the danger zone if left overnight on a counter as a 19th-century larder would have allowed. Overnight in the refrigerator under about 2 lb of weight is enough to set it.
- Aspic and butterThe strained poaching broth, reduced and clarified, sets on its own if the carcass and feet went in; otherwise add a little gelatin. "Masked with liquefied butter" means brushing the chilled roll with just-melted, barely warm butter so it sets to an opaque white coat — the butter must be cool enough not to melt the surface fat.
- Yield and serviceA boned chicken plus the fillets from two other birds makes a roll that will serve perhaps ten or twelve as a cold first course, sliced quarter-inch thick. It keeps three or four days refrigerated and should be cut cold and eaten at cool room temperature.
Galantine — the name is usually connected with an Old French word for something jellied, though the derivation is not certain, and the dish is generally traced to the practice of boning, stuffing and pressing poultry for cold buffet service — was standard grand-hotel work in Oscar Tschirky's day, when the cold table was as much a display as a meal and a bird that arrived at table looking whole but sliced like a terrine was a demonstration of kitchen skill. Oscar, maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf from 1893, was not a cook by trade but assembled this 1896 book from the hotel's working repertoire: heavily French in technique, generous with truffles, and built around dishes that could be made in advance and held. The instruction to sew the bird "into shapes as near the original as possible" is the whole point of the genre.