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Vol-au-Vent of Beef Tendons
Remove the nerves and skin from the beef tendons and place them in a basin with enough water to cover them and let them soak until quite white; then place in a saucepan of salted water and a little vinegar, and boil for ten minutes. Line a vol-au-vent case with good puff paste and bake in an oven; when done take out, and after it has become cold, turn it out. Put in the oven for a few minutes to warm and then put in the pieces of tendon and pour over sufficient bechamel sauce to cover them, and put a couple of dozen boiled button mushrooms on top of this; place the vol-au-vent in the oven, and serve very hot.
Lamb. Ballotin of Lamb with Peas Remove the bone from a shoulder of lamb weighing about three pounds, leaving the end bone for a handle; season with one-half tablespoonful of salt and the same quantity of pepper. Sew it up with string, fasten firmly and boil for about three minutes in the stockpot. After allowing it to cool, lard the top with a larding-needle as for a fricandeau and place it in a saucepan with a piece of pork skin, an onion and a carrot cut into pieces. Brown lightly for six or eight minutes, then moisten with one-half pint of broth, cook in the oven for three-quarters of an hour, remove it and strain the sauce over one pint of hot boiled green peas, then cook for two minutes longer. Place the garnishing on a hot dish, remove the strings from the ballotin, lay it on top of the garnishing, and serve.
Two Waldorf service-kitchen dishes run together on one page: a vol-au-vent filled with beef tendon, and a boned, rolled shoulder of lamb. Both assume a brigade with stock, sauce and pastry already standing by, and both have timings that make sense only in that context.
- The ten minutes is a blanch, not the cookingBeef tendon is nearly pure collagen and stays rubbery until it has simmered three to four hours (about 45 minutes at pressure) and turned translucent and gelatinous. Oscar's ten minutes in salted, vinegared water is the preliminary whitening step; a hotel kitchen would then have moved the tendons to a long braise or a stockpot. Cooked only as written they are inedible.
- Sourcing tendonAsk a halal, Chinese or Latin butcher for beef tendon, usually sold frozen in one-pound bags, already trimmed. "Remove the nerves and skin" means peeling off the tough silverskin and any adhering fascia before the cold-water soak.
- Vol-au-vent caseA round of puff pastry with a second ring set on top so it rises into a wall. Here the paste lines a case or mould, so 'turn it out' most likely means unmoulding it; the inside is then hollowed to leave a shell. The book gives no temperature; in a modern oven bake until fully coloured, around 400-425F, since a pale case collapses under sauce.
- Béchamel hereIn this period a savoury white sauce for meat was very often built on veal or chicken stock rather than milk alone. A velouté made with the tendon cooking liquor, finished with cream, is closer to what the kitchen would have served.
- Button mushrooms'Boiled' means the classic blanc: small caps simmered a couple of minutes in water with butter and lemon juice so they stay white. The recipe's couple of dozen suits a single case.
- Ballotin lardingA larding needle threading strips of pork fat through the surface is a technique for lean meat and modern lamb shoulder does not need it. The sheet of pork skin in the pan is there for gelatine and to keep the meat off the metal; a rack and a splash more broth do the same.
- The half tablespoon of pepperThat is about 1½ teaspoons of salt and 1½ of pepper for three pounds of meat. The salt is defensible for a rolled joint; that much pepper will overwhelm it. Season to taste.
- Braising temperature and donenessCook the lamb covered at 325-350F. Forty-five minutes will give a rosy centre on a compact three-pound roll; if you want shoulder that pulls apart, it needs closer to two hours.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A case of this size would serve roughly four as a first course, and the ballotin four to six with its peas.
Vol-au-vent — "flight in the wind," for pastry so light it might blow away — is a nineteenth-century French restaurant staple, and its fillings ranged widely, from lobster and chicken to sweetbreads, cockscombs, quenelles, brains, and here tendon. Tendon in particular belongs to the logic of a grand hotel kitchen, where whole carcasses were broken down and nothing that could be turned into gelatine was thrown away. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name is on this 1896 book, was not himself a cook, and the volume reads accordingly — a compendium of the house repertoire set down for a public that would mostly read rather than execute it, which is why steps a professional would take for granted, such as the long simmer that makes tendon edible, simply are not written down.