No. 2337

Woodcock Quenelles a la d'Artois

Quenelles de Becasses a la d'Artois

Butter some pieces of strong paper three inches by four, spread on them a layer of woodcock quenelle forcemeat (No. 91), oval-shaped, two and a half inches long by one and a half wide and a quarter of an inch thick; garnish the centers with a brown montglas (No. 747), and cover with another layer of the quenelle forcemeat, having it dome-shaped, and smoothing with a knife. Decorate the top with truffles and red tongue; cover with thin slices of fat pork and a strong buttered paper, then poach them in a slack oven until they are firm to the touch; dress them crown-shaped in a dish, cover them with half-glaze (No. 400) and Madeira sauce (No. 492); serve separately a sauce-boat of the same sauce.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is an assembly recipe that assumes you have already made three other things from Ranhofer's book: the woodcock forcemeat, a brown montglas, and a half-glaze. Read those cross-references first, because the quenelle work here is trivial compared to the mise en place behind it.

The hinge: temperature, not timeThese are poached, not baked; the recipe says to poach them in a slack oven. "Slack" is generally taken to mean a cool oven, somewhere around 250-300F, but no temperature is given in the book. Cook gently until the forcemeat is springy and firm to the touch, checking from about fifteen minutes on for pieces this size. If the oven is hot enough to brown anything, a delicate quenelle forcemeat will break and weep fat.
Paper as a cooking vesselThe buttered paper is the mould. Use parchment cut to about 3 by 4 inches; modern greaseproof paper behaves the same way and will not stick once buttered. Set the papers on a sheet pan so the quenelles hold their oval shape.
WoodcockWoodcock cannot legally be bought in the United States, where commercial sale of wild migratory game birds is prohibited; in Britain wild woodcock may still be sold by game dealers in season. Failing either, farmed squab, quail or duck breast makes a workable forcemeat with the same method, though it will be noticeably milder than woodcock's iron-and-liver flavour.
MontglasRanhofer's montglas (No. 747) is a fine salpicon of tongue, truffle, mushroom and foie gras bound with reduced sauce, chilled until it can be spooned as a solid filling. It has to be cold and stiff going in, or it will run out into the forcemeat during poaching.
Fat porkThin sheets of fresh pork back fat, sliced almost translucent. Ask a butcher for fatback and freeze it briefly before slicing, or substitute caul fat. Its job is to keep the surface from drying, not to add flavour, so it is discarded before saucing.
Red tongue and truffleThe decoration is cut from cooked, cured beef tongue, pink from the cure rather than dyed, and black truffle, both sliced paper-thin and stamped into small shapes. Press them onto the wet forcemeat before covering; they set into the surface as it poaches.
The saucesHalf-glaze (No. 400) is demi-glace; Madeira sauce (No. 492) is that base finished with Madeira. Use them to nap the quenelles and keep enough back for the sauce boat the recipe calls for, since the dish is dry without it.
YieldThe original gives none. At two and a half inches each, allow two quenelles per person as a first course; a crown on a round platter looks right with eight to twelve.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his service manual: over 3,500 numbered items that refer to one another like a codebase, so that a single entrée entry can assume a forcemeat, a garnish and two sauces already exist elsewhere in the book. Garnishes styled a la d'Artois are generally traced to the Comte d'Artois, the future Charles X of France, whose name attached itself to a family of dishes in the classical repertoire during and after the Restoration; by Ranhofer's day the label signalled little more than a rich forcemeat with a truffled filling. The woodcock itself explains the period as much as the technique does: wild game birds were still sold openly in American markets in the 1890s, and a restaurant could list becasse alongside canvasback duck and plover. Market hunting on that scale is what prompted the Lacey Act of 1900 and, later, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which ended the commercial trade in wild birds and quietly retired a large part of this book's larder.