Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Truffles for Garnish
Truffles for Garnish
Choose large round truffles, wash them thoroughly, and peel them; put the required number into a saucepan, pour over sufficient chicken broth or champagne to nearly cover them, add an onion stuck with three or four cloves, a clove of garlic, a bunch of sweet herbs, and a little of the skimmings of the chicken broth or fat. Place the saucepan on the fire and boil for fifteen minutes, with the lid on the pan; then remove it from the fire, and let the truffles cool in their liquor. Remove them, drain, and they are ready for use. Or they may be boiled for ten minutes, and then cut into various shapes. The trimmings from them, after they have been cooked, may be employed in making sauce, as well as the liquor in which they were cooked.
This is a prep, not a dish: fresh truffles poached in seasoned liquid so they can be sliced, stamped or turned into decorative shapes for cold work and garnishing. Almost everything about it depends on starting with genuine fresh tubers.
- What "truffle" meant hereThe instruction to wash and peel points to fresh whole tubers, most likely the winter black truffle, Tuber melanosporum, sold dirty and often quite large. Summer truffle (T. aestivum) is far cheaper and far milder, and Chinese truffle (T. indicum) looks the part but carries little aroma. Nothing labelled "truffle oil" is relevant to this recipe.
- Peeling and the trimmingsPeel with a small knife or a swivel peeler over a bowl so nothing is lost. The last line is the point of the whole exercise: peelings, offcuts and the poaching liquor go into sauce.
- Fifteen minutes is longTruffle aroma is volatile and largely leaves with the steam. Modern practice is a brief covered simmer of a few minutes, or none at all for slicing raw. If you follow the original timing, treat the cooking liquor as the more valuable product and reduce it into a sauce.
- Lid on, and cool in the liquorBoth instructions matter more than the clock. The closed pan keeps the aromatics in the pot, and cooling in the poaching liquid at least lets the truffle take some of it back up. Do not drain them hot.
- Champagne or brothAny dry sparkling or still white wine does the same work; the champagne is Waldorf theatre. If using broth, unsalted or lightly salted is better, since the liquor will be reduced later and can turn briny.
- "Skimmings of the chicken broth or fat"The fat skimmed off a simmering stockpot. A spoonful of rendered chicken fat, or good stock with its fat left on, stands in for it well enough.
- Bunch of sweet herbsPeriod shorthand for a bouquet garni: parsley stems, thyme, a bay leaf, tied or bagged so it can be lifted out cleanly.
- Preserved trufflesTinned or jarred truffles have already been cooked and sterilised. They need no poaching at all, and the packing liquid should be saved and used the way Oscar uses his.
- Yield and useYield depends entirely on the size of the tuber and how thin you cut; the recipe fixes neither. Cut cold, with a sharp knife or aspic cutters, on a firm truffle rather than a warm one.
Oscar Tschirky was not a chef but the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, and this entry belongs to the decorative side of the grand-hotel kitchen he presided over, his book appearing in 1896. Black truffle was then a garnish material as much as a flavouring: poached, cooled firm, then sliced thin or cut with tiny cutters into crescents, stars and rounds to be set into aspic, laid over chaud-froid sauce on cold chicken and galantines, or studded through forcemeats. That fashion is generally traced to the French service codified by Carême and carried into the hotel era by Escoffier and his contemporaries, and a New York house that wanted to be read as Parisian would have followed it. The insistence on saving trimmings and cooking liquid reflects the price: Périgord truffle was expensive in Oscar's day, and it has only grown more so as production fell through the twentieth century.