No. 2302

Hashed Woodcock in a Croustade with Soft Eggs

Hachis de Becasses en Croustade aux Oeufs Mollets

Line a low croustade mold (Fig. 152) with fine foundation paste (No. 135), form an outer edge and egg it over twice; cover the bottom and sides with buttered paper and fill it with uncooked rice, bake in a moderate oven and then empty of its contents. Take the meats from six cooked woodcock and cut them into small three-sixteenths inch squares, after suppressing all the bones, skin and sinews. Fry the intestines in butter, pound these with the meat from the legs, etc., and make of it a puree to place in a saucepan with the fragments and parings; add a few minced shallots and boil up for some moments, then put in some espagnole sauce (No. 414), pass the whole through a tammy and reduce to the consistency of a half-glaze sauce (No. 413); now add the woodcock meats and season properly. Fill the croustades with this hash and on top of it range either well drained poached eggs (No. 2931) or soft eggs (No. 2949). This hash can also be dressed in a bread croustade fried in butter.

← No. 2301 Venison Hash, American Style and with Poache Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2303 Young Rabbit Hash Garnished with Croquettes →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a brigade, a stocked sauce station and a game larder. Stripped to essentials this is a pastry case filled with a rich salmi-style hash and topped with eggs; the work is in the sauce and the sourcing.

Sourcing the birdsWild woodcock cannot legally be sold in the United States, so unless you shoot them or are given them by someone who did, the dish must be built on something else. Squab, wood pigeon, quail or well-hung duck legs give the same dark, faintly livery character; six woodcock yield perhaps 12 oz of picked meat, which is roughly three squab or eight quail.
The trail"Fry the intestines in butter" is not an error. Woodcock is traditionally cooked undrawn and the trail — intestines minus the gizzard — pounded into a paste is what makes a salmi taste of woodcock rather than of brown sauce. If you substitute another bird, use its liver and heart instead.
Lead shotWild-shot birds may carry shot pellets and fine lead fragments through the flesh. Pick the meat carefully by hand, and be aware that pounding trail and parings distributes anything you missed. Some cooks avoid game shot with lead entirely for this reason.
Blind baking the croustade"Moderate oven" corresponds to roughly 350F in a modern range; the book gives no temperature. The buttered paper and uncooked rice are ordinary blind-baking weights; parchment and dried beans or ceramic weights do the same. Egging the rim twice gives the gloss and seals the pastry so the hash does not soak through.
Foundation pasteNo. 135 is a firm flour-and-butter paste meant to hold its shape as a container rather than eat well. A sturdy pâte brisée behaves the same way. The alternative Ranhofer offers — a case of bread fried in butter — is faster and better eating.
Espagnole and half-glazeEspagnole (No. 414) is the old brown mother sauce, veal stock thickened with brown roux; demi-glace (No. 413) is that sauce reduced with more stock until it coats. A good reduced brown game or veal stock, finished with a little butter, stands in. Reduce until it naps a spoon — too loose and the hash floods the pastry.
Passing through a tammyA tammy is a fine worsted cloth through which sauce was forced with two people twisting the ends. A fine chinois pressed hard with a ladle, or a blitz and a sieve, achieves the same smoothness.
Order of operationsThe hinge is that the diced meat goes in last, off the boil. It is already cooked; simmering it in the reduction turns it grey and stringy. Warm it through in the finished sauce and no longer.
Eggs and yieldOeufs mollets are boiled about 5-6 minutes and peeled, poached eggs drained hard on a cloth so no water thins the sauce. Ranhofer gives no serving count; the meat from six birds would plausibly fill one low croustade for four to six as an entrée, one egg apiece.

A Little History

Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of thirty-odd years at Delmonico's, and this entry belongs to the European game cookery that the restaurant imported wholesale for its American clientele. The technique is the classic salmi: roast the bird underdone, carve off the prime meat, and pound the carcass, trail and parings into a brown sauce that is then strained and reduced — a way of extracting every scrap of flavour from a small, expensive bird. Woodcock in particular was prized because it was cooked undrawn, the trail spread on toast being long considered the best part; the practice is generally traced to the bird's habit of feeding on earthworms and voiding cleanly. In Ranhofer's New York such birds arrived by market from professional hunters, a trade that the Lacey Act of 1900 and later migratory-bird law shut down, which is why a dish that was once merely costly is now, for most cooks, simply unobtainable.