No. 2038

Turkey Wings Fricassed and Baked

Fricassee d'Ailerons de Dinde au Gratin

Select a dozen and a half large young turkey wings; singe, bone as far as the first joint and remove the second joint; stuff them with quenelle forcemeat (No. 89) with fine cooked herbs (No. 385) and sew them up. Line a flat buttered saucepan with onions and carrots, slices of fat pork and a garnished bunch of parsley (No. 123), range the wings on top larded across with two rows of larding pork (No. 4, Fig. 52) or else leave them unlarded, and then moisten with stock (No. 194a), seasoning with salt and whole peppers, cover over with buttered paper and let boil. Push the saucepan into a slack oven and three-quarters of an hour after add six small onions for each wing, previously blanched in boiling water. When the whole is cooked take out both the onions and wings, strain the stock through a sieve, add to it some veloute sauce (No. 415), and reduce together; thicken the sauce with raw egg-yolks and fresh butter, pass it through a tammy, season to taste. Put a part of this sauce into a deep china dish capable of being placed in the oven, lay the wings and onions on top, and pour over the remainder of the sauce; bestrew with bread-crumbs and parmesan and let acquire a good color while in the oven; drain and serve the dish on another covered with a folded napkin.

← No. 2037 Turkey—Breasts or Fillets—a la Donovan Turkey & Guinea Fowl No. 2039 Turkey Wings with Celery and Chestnuts →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic French braise-then-gratin treatment of turkey wings, written for a kitchen with a stockpot always going and a pastry cook down the hall. The whole dish hinges on the finish: once the egg yolks go into the sauce it must not boil.

Scale it downEighteen wings is banquet quantity, enough for twelve to eighteen people. Six wings and a proportionate amount of vegetables and stock behave the same way in a Dutch oven; the six blanched small onions per wing is also a Delmonico's flourish you can cut to two or three.
"Slack oven"A slack or slow oven is usually glossed as somewhere around 300-325F, though the book gives no temperatures. The braise wants to hold at a bare simmer under its buttered paper, not bubble; count on 1½ to 2 hours total for wings this size, with the onions going in three-quarters of an hour after the pan enters the oven, as directed.
Boning and stuffingBone as far as the first joint means freeing the humerus from the drumette; the recipe also has you remove the second joint, which leaves a pocket to fill. Quenelle forcemeat (No. 89) is a pounded forcemeat bound with egg; a food processor does it in a minute. Trussing needle and butcher's twine to close, and do not overfill -- the forcemeat expands.
Larding porkLarding pork is fresh back fat cut into lardons and threaded through the meat with a larding needle, not cured bacon. Salt pork or unsmoked fatback works; the recipe itself allows you to skip it, and turkey wings are not lean enough to need it.
Velouté and the tammyVelouté (No. 415) is a white roux sauce built on white poultry stock. A tammy is a fine cloth for forcing sauce through; a fine chinois or a doubled sieve replaces it. Note that the recipe passes the sauce through the tammy after the yolks go in, not before.
The egg-yolk liaisonOff the heat, temper the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce, return them, and hold the sauce below 180F. Above that it curdles and no amount of straining brings it back.
The gratinFor the final browning use a hot oven, 425–450F, or a broiler, for five to eight minutes only — the point is color on the crumbs and Parmesan, not further cooking. The dish is already hot; a long stay in the oven breaks the sauce.
ServingThe napkin-lined underdish is nineteenth-century service to keep the gratin dish from sliding and to catch drips. It has no effect on the food.

A Little History

This is from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the book's habit of cross-referencing: the wings depend on several other numbered preparations before you can begin. Ailerons — wing pinions — belong to the thrifty end of French classical cookery, the cuts left over once the breasts and legs had gone out as fillets and cuisses, and one common remedy for their toughness and awkward bones seems to have been much like this: bone the drumette, fill the cavity with forcemeat so it slices cleanly, braise it slowly on a bed of aromatics, then reduce the braising liquid into a rich sauce. Finishing the whole thing au gratin under crumbs and Parmesan let a large-scale kitchen assemble the dish in advance and send it out browned to order, which may be why a hotel-restaurant chef bothered with a cut that many home cooks of the period are likely to have treated as soup-pot material.