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Valencia Garnish
This is made of a truffle, mushrooms, beef-tongue and rice prepared as follows: Cut a truffle, three mushrooms and a very little cooked tongue into shreds, add three tablespoonfuls of boiled rice, put them all into a saucepan with three tablespoonfuls of tomato sauce, a third of a tablespoonful of salt, one level teaspoonful of pepper and one tablespoonful of grated cheese. Boil for five minutes, when it is ready for use.
A classical garnish rather than a dish in its own right — a spoonful set beside or on top of a plated meat, egg or fish course. It comes together in about ten minutes once the rice is cooked.
- Amounts and yieldAs written this makes something over half a cup, enough to garnish a few plates. The proportions scale straight up if you need more.
- Salt and pepper"A third of a tablespoonful" of salt is a level teaspoon. The level teaspoon of pepper is out of step with modern palates for this volume — a quarter teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper is closer to what a cook today would want, and you can add more at the end.
- The truffleFresh black truffle is a luxury purchase; a small jarred or canned truffle, drained and cut into fine julienne, does the job here since it is being simmered in tomato sauce. Truffle oil is not a substitute — it will read as perfume rather than as one of four shredded elements.
- Mushrooms"Three mushrooms" most likely means three small fresh button mushrooms, perhaps two ounces. Sauté the shreds briefly in butter first if you want them to hold their shape; raw mushroom added straight to the pan will release water and loosen the sauce.
- Beef tongueCooked, peeled tongue is still sold at good butchers and in Latin and Jewish markets, either pickled or plain-boiled; the recipe asks only for cooked tongue. "A very little" is probably an ounce at most — it is there for colour and savour, not bulk.
- The riceThree tablespoons of already-boiled rice, cooked on the firm side. Long-grain holds up; anything starchy or overcooked will smear into paste during the five minutes of simmering.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in a kitchen of this era most likely means Parmesan, though the recipe does not say. Stir it in off the heat if you can, or keep the pan barely at a simmer, so it melts smoothly instead of tightening into strings.
- The five minutesMostly a marrying step: the rice and tongue are already cooked, though the truffle and mushrooms go in raw. The recipe says boil, but a gentle simmer is safer — stir until the tomato sauce coats the shreds and the mixture mounds on a spoon, and stop there.
Classical French kitchen service ran on named garnishes: a dish sent out à la Valencienne or with a Valencia garnish would generally involve rice, tomato and cheese, the Spanish city serving as shorthand for rice cookery in the European culinary vocabulary of the period. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms and whose name went on this 1896 volume, was cataloguing that shared professional shorthand for American households — which is why the book is thick with short entries like this one that assume you already know what to put the garnish on. The truffle and tongue mark it as hotel food rather than home food.