No. 2345

Shells of Chicken or Sweetbreads

Coquilles de Volaille ou de Ris de Veau

Have either some silver or china shells (Fig.438) or else some scallop shells; butter and dredge over with bread-crumbs; mince some braised white meat of chicken or else sweetbreads with half as many mushrooms and put it into a sautoir; mix with veloute sauce (No. 415); let all boil, then thicken with raw egg-yolks, cream and fresh butter. Fill the shells with this preparation, bestrew the tops with bread-crumbs and a little grated parmesan, and baste with melted butter; brown in a brisk oven.

← No. 2344 Shells of Chicken a la Shaw Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2346 Shells of Fish →

For the Modern Kitchen

A gratin of minced chicken or sweetbreads bound in velouté, baked in scallop shells. The only real difficulty is the liaison: once the egg yolks go in, the mixture must not boil.

The hinge: the liaisonThicken with yolks, cream and butter off the heat, or over the barest heat, and stop as soon as the sauce coats a spoon. A boil after the yolks go in scrambles them and the filling turns grainy and weeps in the oven.
"Brisk oven"A hot oven; in modern terms somewhere in the region of 425-450F, though the book gives no figure. The filling is already cooked, so the bake need only be long enough to set the crust and brown the parmesan — roughly 8 to 10 minutes. A broiler finish also works.
SautoirA sautoir is a straight-sided shallow pan, not a sauté pan with flared sides. Any wide saucepan does; you want surface area so the sauce reduces rather than steams.
Velouté (No. 415)Ranhofer's velouté is a blond roux moistened with white veal or chicken stock and simmered down. A well-reduced chicken velouté, thick enough to mound on a spoon, is what the filling needs — a thin sauce will run out of the shells.
SweetbreadsOrder veal sweetbreads ahead; most supermarkets do not stock them. They must be soaked in cold water, blanched, pressed and peeled of membrane before the braising the recipe assumes, and they are perishable — use within a day.
Proportions"half as many mushrooms" is not specified further; the simplest reading is half the volume of the minced meat. Cook the mushrooms down first and drain them, or their liquid will loosen the sauce.
The shellsSilver and china coquilles are collectors' items now; deep scallop shells, small gratin dishes or ramekins all serve. Real shells should be scrubbed and boiled before first use, and they hold heat, so let them sit a minute before serving.
YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. A large braised chicken breast, or a pair of sweetbreads, with the mushrooms, will fill roughly half a dozen shells as a first course.

A Little History

This is one of a long run of coquilles in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of his thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York. Shell dishes suited a restaurant kitchen and a service à la russe dinner perfectly: portioned into identical vessels and finished to order under a fierce oven, they arrived looking composed rather than salvaged. Sweetbreads and the white meat of chicken were both prized pale meats, and the velouté-and-yolk liaison — the sauce allemande logic Ranhofer inherited from Carême's generation — was the standard way to make them richer without darkening them. The taste for such pale, mild, elaborately bound entrées largely died with the multi-course dinner itself.