No. 2221

Boudins of Salmon with Shrimps

Boudins de Saumon aux Crevettes

Prepare one pound of fish quenelle forcemeat made with salmon (No. 90). Butter some boudin molds the same as for boudins of chicken au cardinal (No. 2216) and garnish the sides with the delicately prepared salmon forcemeat, adding to it four ounces of fresh mushrooms, and two ounces of truffles, both cut into eighth of an inch square bits; lay one mold on top of the other, and set them in a sautoir close together; pour over boiling water, and put them to poach in a slack oven; unmold and dress them on a well-buttered Normande sauce (No. 509).

← No. 2220 Boudins of Kingfish a la Poniatowski Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2222 Skewers of Chicken Livers, Colbert Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already has quenelle forcemeat, Normande sauce and truffles on hand, so the entry is really an assembly note. The points below fill in what the cross-references carry.

The hinge: never let the water boilForcemeat set in a water bath must poach, not simmer. Hold the water around 170-180F; a boil expands the air and cream in the mixture and the boudins soufflé, then collapse and weep. They are done when the centre reaches about 150F, roughly 20-30 minutes depending on mould size.
"Slack oven"A cooling or barely warm oven; period sources gloss it as roughly 250-300F. The oven here is only a gentle, even heat source for the bain-marie; the water temperature is what matters.
Fish quenelle forcemeatA quenelle forcemeat of this kind is raw fish pounded with a panada and butter or cream, then sieved; No. 90 carries Ranhofer's own proportions. A food processor does the work: cold salmon, salt, a little egg white, then cream added in a thin stream with the bowl and blade well chilled. Keep everything thoroughly chilled or the emulsion breaks.
Boudin mouldsSmall cylindrical or sausage-shaped moulds, lined with forcemeat and closed by inverting a second mould over the first. Buttered dariole moulds, timbale moulds or straight-sided ramekins all work; so does rolling the forcemeat in buttered parchment or plastic film into cylinders and poaching them that way.
The shrimps in the titleThe text as printed never says where the crevettes go. They most plausibly belong to the filling or to the garnish around the dressed boudins; Normande sauce worked with shrimp butter is the classic derivative sauce crevette. Add cooked peeled shrimp to the centre of each mould, or scatter them over the sauce.
TrufflesTwo ounces of truffle to a pound of forcemeat is unremarkable in Ranhofer's kitchen and an extravagance now. Preserved truffle peelings, or simply more mushroom cooked dry and seasoned, give the dark fleck without the cost; truffle oil does not behave the same way in a poached forcemeat.
Normande sauceNo. 509 is classically a fish velouté enriched with mushroom and oyster essence, then finished off the heat with an egg-yolk-and-cream liaison. Once the yolks are in, keep it below a simmer or it will curdle. Nap the plate first, as directed, and set the boudins on top so the surfaces stay distinct.
YieldA pound of forcemeat with the garnish will fill roughly six to eight small moulds; the recipe itself gives no yield. It is an entrée portion, not a main dish.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows how that kitchen worked: a numbered forcemeat, a numbered sauce, a mould shape borrowed from another dish, and three lines of assembly. Boudin normally means a sausage — blood pudding or the white boudin blanc — and by the nineteenth century French cooks had carried the word over to any delicate forcemeat shaped in a cylinder and poached, so a boudin of salmon has the form of a sausage and nothing of its butchery. Quenelle-based entrées of this kind were the technical showpieces of the period, prized because a properly made forcemeat is light without any leavening at all.