No. 2217

Boudins of Chicken with Montebello Sauce

Boudins de Volaille a la Sauce Montebello

Put a pound and a quarter of chicken quenelle forcemeat (No. 89) into a vessel; smooth and mix in a quarter as much salpicon of truffles and cooked foies-gras. Lift the forcemeat with a tablespoon and push it with the finger to have it fall on a floured table; roll these pieces into sausage shapes, flatten a little on both sides with the blade of a knife, then range them at once in small quantities on a smooth and floured saucepan lid without once handling them. Place a saute pan on the fire with water, salt it when it reaches boiling point, then slide in the boudins, boil up once and remove to the side of the range, leaving in the boudins until the forcemeat hardens, then lift them out with a skimmer and lay them on a cloth, one next to the other, to wipe and pare lightly. Dip them into beaten egg, roll in fresh white bread-crumbs and place them on the bottom of a sautoir with clarified butter to brown both sides while turning them over carefully; drain and dish in a circle on a Montebello sauce (No. 502).

← No. 2216 Boudins of Chicken au Cardinal Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2218 Boundins of Game a la Berchoux →

For the Modern Kitchen

A quenelle preparation dressed as a small white sausage: poached, breaded, fried in butter. Ranhofer writes for a professional kitchen and cross-references half the work to other numbers, so a little translation is needed.

The hinge: never let the water boil againThe hinge: do not let the water return to a rolling boil -- once the boudins are slid in, bring it up once and pull the pan to the side of the heat, as Ranhofer directs. Held at a bare simmer, well below a boil, the forcemeat sets firm; at a rolling boil the little sausages are liable to burst.
Quenelle forcemeat (No. 89)A chicken quenelle forcemeat of the classical type: pounded raw chicken worked cold with a panada and butter or cream (check No. 89 itself for the exact proportions). A pound and a quarter is roughly 570 g. If you are substituting a modern mousseline forcemeat, keep everything refrigerator-cold and poach a test spoonful before shaping the rest.
"A quarter as much salpicon"About 5 oz total of truffle and cooked foie gras cut in small even dice (a salpicon is a dice, not a mince). Cut it no larger than 1/8 inch or the boudins will split along the pieces.
Foies-grasRanhofer's "cooked foies-gras" would be a prepared goose or duck liver, chilled hard so it dices cleanly. Chicken liver parfait behaves similarly in the mouth but will darken the pale forcemeat.
VesselsA "saute pan" or "sautoir" here is a straight-sided shallow pan, used for the poaching water and again for the butter. The floured saucepan lid is simply a flat, floured surface you can carry to the water and tip the boudins off, so they are never picked up once shaped.
Clarified butter, and whyWhole butter at breading-browning heat will burn its milk solids and speckle the crumbs. Clarified butter takes the pan to 350F comfortably; a neutral oil with a little butter added at the end works as well.
Montebello sauce (No. 502)Another cross-reference in the same book, not a modern pantry item; its composition is given at No. 502, not here. Pool it on the plate and stand the boudins in a ring on it, as directed.
YieldRanhofer gives none. As a rough guide, the mixture should make somewhere in the region of 16 to 20 boudins of two to three inches, enough for six to eight as an entree course.

A Little History

Boudin in French is the ordinary term for a sausage or pudding, principally the blood sausage, and the white boudins of the classic kitchen -- pale forcemeats of chicken or veal poached in water rather than stuffed into casings -- are the refined cousins of boudin blanc. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a working encyclopedia, which is why this entry reads as a set of pointers to other numbered recipes rather than a self-contained dish: the forcemeat, the sauce and the garnish each had their own paragraph elsewhere in the book, and the cook was expected to have them all. The dish belongs to the sequence of boudins he lists one after another, distinguished only by their sauces and garnishes -- au cardinal, ight la Berchoux, ight la sauce Montebello -- a habit of naming that let a kitchen build dozens of menu items from one afternoon's forcemeat. Berchoux takes its name from the poet Joseph Berchoux, author of La Gastronomie. Montebello is one of the many nineteenth-century garnish names generally traced to a Napoleonic title; such attributions in the classical repertory are traditional rather than documented.