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Truffles in Croustades
Wash and peel six or eight truffles, chop them up small, put them into a saucepan with a little butter, and salt and pepper to taste, warm them over with a quick fire, and pour in four tablespoonfuls each of Madeira wine and melted glaze. Remove the saucepan from the fire when the liquor is reduced to half its original quantity, add a lump of butter, stir it in well, and keep the preparation warm, Cut some slices of bread about two-thirds of an inch thick, and cut these into the shapes of hearts, or any other desired shapes, mark them on one surface with the point of a knife, place them in a fryingpan with butter and fry them. Open them where they were marked, remove the insides, fill them with the truffle mixture, and serve on a napkin spread over a dish.
Truffles, Italian Style Scrub thoroughly in water eight or ten truffles, peel them, cut them up into thin slices, place them in a baking-tin, sprinkle over them one tablespoonful of finely-chopped parsley, pepper to taste, and a small quantity of powdered mace. Pour over them four tablespoonfuls of olive oil, place them in a fairly hot oven, and bake them for forty-five or fifty minutes. When cooked, place the truffles on a hot dish, squeeze the juice of half a lemon over them, and serve.
Stewed Truffles on Crust Cut some slices of bread about three-fourths of an inch in thickness, and shape the pieces like half-hearts, making them round on one end and pointed on the other, with the point of a knife, cutting an incision on one side only of each piece of bread. Fry them in butter until of a light golden color, then drain and hollow them out, but keep them warm. Cut about one-half pound of raw green truffles into small pieces, place them in a stewpan with a lump of butter, season them with salt and pepper, and fry them over a brisk fire. Pour over the truffles one teacupful of melted glaze, and one teacupful of Madeira wine, and boil them gently until the liquor has been reduced to half its original quantity. Remove the truffles from the fire, thicken their cooking liquor with a small quantity of sauce and two or three ounces of butter, and stir it for a few minutes at the side of the fire; then fill the crusts with it. Arrange them on a folded napkin laid on a dish, and serve them while hot.
Three variations on the same luxury: fresh truffles cooked hot and fast, either bound with meat glaze and Madeira or simply oiled and baked. The vocabulary is the main obstacle.
- Glaze"Melted glaze" is glace de viande — brown veal or beef stock reduced to a syrup that sets solid when cold. Commercial demi-glace concentrate or a well-reduced homemade brown stock stands in; do not substitute bouillon cubes, which are mostly salt and will ruin the balance once reduced by half.
- TeacupfulA teacup in this period is smaller than the modern 8 oz measuring cup; period sources put it at anywhere from about 4 to 6 fl oz. The stewed truffle version therefore takes roughly ½ to ¾ cup each of glaze and Madeira, reduced by half as the recipe directs.
- "Raw green truffles"Green here means fresh and unprocessed, not a colour or an unripe state; in this period preserved truffles were the common trade article, so the wording likely marks the distinction. Half a pound of fresh truffle is an extravagance now; a few ounces sliced thin over more crostini will serve the same purpose.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperatures; "fairly hot" would correspond to something in the region of a modern 400F oven. Forty-five to fifty minutes at that heat is a long time for sliced truffle and will cook off most of the aroma — a shorter, gentler bake, or a warming in the oil off the heat, preserves far more.
- PeelingThe instruction to peel is worth following for black winter truffles with gritty skin, but save the peelings: steep them in the Madeira or the oil rather than discarding them.
- CroustadesCut the bread from a firm day-old white loaf, score a lid about ¼ inch inside the edge, fry in clarified butter so it does not burn, then lift the lid and pull out the crumb while still hot. Ordinary butter over a brisk pan will blacken before the bread colours evenly.
- "A small quantity of sauce"The thickening in the last recipe is unspecified, most likely because a brown sauce such as espagnole would have been to hand in a hotel kitchen. A tablespoon of demi-glace or a very small beurre manié does the job; the butter mounted in at the end is what gives the gloss, and the recipe keeps it at the side of the fire rather than over it.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many croustades six or eight truffles will fill; on this scale it is a garnish course or a canapé for a few people, not a main dish.
Oscar Tschirky was never a cook by trade; he was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, and the 1896 book that carries his name is largely a compilation of the hotel kitchen's French repertoire set down for an American public that had begun to eat out in earnest. Truffles ran through that repertoire as a marker of expense as much as flavour — Périgord blacks arriving preserved in tins and jars from France, Piedmont whites more rarely, both of them shorthand for a kitchen that could afford them. The croustade itself is older and humbler in origin: a fried or baked bread case used across French cookery to hold a rich filling that would soak through pastry, and a neat way of making a few ounces of something very costly stretch across a table. Serving on a folded napkin, specified in two of the three recipes here — the Italian-style truffles go onto a hot dish instead — was standard hotel practice for anything fried, absorbing grease.