No. 2424

Voliere Galantine of Pheasant a la Waddington

Voliere Galantine de Faisan a la Waddington

Prepare one pheasant instead of two as described in the Casimir Perier; dress it exactly the same and stand it on an oval socle four to five inches high by seven and a half inches long and four inches wide; place this on another oval socle about six inches high, eleven and a half inches long and eight inches wide. Pick off all the meat from a young rabbit, cut it in small dice and fry them in fat pork over a brisk fire; when cold, pound and add the same quantity of grated fresh fat pork over a brisk fire; when cold, pound and add the same quantity of grated fresh fat pork; pound all together again and season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg; press it through a sieve and mix in with the preparation a quarter as much fat pork cut in three-sixteenths of an inch squares, and then blanched, and as much truffle cut the same size. With this fill twelve timbale molds (No. 2, Fig. 137), cover with very thin slices of fat pork, and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour; remove and set aside to cool. Decorate some timbale molds (No. 1, Fig. 137), with cuts of truffles and egg-white, pour a little jelly into the bottom of each mold. Unmold the No. 2 timbales, remove all the fat from the bottoms and sides, pare nicely and then put them into the No. 1 molds, filling up with jelly; when very firm, unmold and arrange them around the small socle of the galantine exactly under the pheasant, placing a border of jelly croutons outside.

← No. 2423 Voliere Galantine of Pheasants a la Casimir The Cold Service No. 2425 Ballotines of Lamb Cupola Shaped →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is one entry in a chain: it sends you back to No. 2423 for the galantine itself and only describes the pheasant's pedestal and the ring of rabbit timbales set around it. Read it as the decoration plan for a cold buffet centerpiece, with a genuine forcemeat recipe embedded in the middle.

The recipe is incomplete on its ownEverything about boning, stuffing, poaching and glazing the pheasant lives in No. 2423 ("a la Casimir Perier"), halved here to one bird. Without that entry you have only the timbale garnish and the staging.
A printer's repetitionThe line "fry them in fat pork over a brisk fire; when cold, pound and add the same quantity of grated fresh fat pork over a brisk fire; when cold, pound and add the same quantity of grated fresh fat pork" is a duplication in the type. The instruction is: fry the diced rabbit in pork fat, cool, pound, then pound in an equal weight of grated fresh fatback.
Fat porkThe recipe specifies "fresh" only for the grated pork pounded into the forcemeat, i.e. unsalted back fat, grated so it works smoothly into the pounded meat. The small cubes added afterwards are blanched, which usually indicates salted pork being freshened first; they are meant to stay visible in the slice.
SocleA decorative plinth. Socles of this period were built from materials such as rice paste, hardened tallow or wax, or a block of bread masked with butter or aspic, and were generally not eaten. A modern cook can use a footed stand or a set of nested platters and lose nothing edible.
VoliereLiterally an aviary. In nineteenth-century garde-manger it signals a bird presented with its own head, tail and wing feathers reattached as a plumed trophy. That element is not described here, and the galantine is complete without it.
The two timbale moldsNo. 2 molds are slightly smaller than No. 1. You bake the forcemeat in the small ones, trim the baked cylinders free of fat, then set each inside a larger mold that has been decorated with truffle and egg white and lined with a film of set aspic, and flood the gap with more aspic. The result is a clear jelly shell around a dark forcemeat core.
Oven and vessel"Moderate oven" is usually read as somewhere around 325-350F. The recipe directs only that the filled molds be covered with very thin slices of fat pork and baked half an hour; it does not call for a water bath and gives no mold capacity.
JellyRanhofer's aspic is a strong, well-clarified game or veal stock set with its own gelatin. Working stock plus powdered gelatin gives the same result; it needs to be firm enough to unmold cleanly, which is stiffer than a jelly you would want to eat by the spoonful.
Yield and holdingTwelve timbales ringing one pheasant would stretch across a cold buffet table; the recipe gives no serving count. Aspic-coated meat is a warm-room hazard: assemble cold, keep it refrigerated until service, and return it to the cold within two hours.
TruffleFresh black truffle is the intent, and the decoration depends on its color against the egg white. Preserved truffle peelings or thin rounds of dark mushroom read almost as well in the cut jelly.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the repertoire he cooked at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry belongs to the most theatrical part of it: the cold buffet, where a boned and reassembled bird was mounted on a plinth, feathered, glazed and ringed with jelly-cased garnishes. The naming is typical of the house, dishes titled for patrons and public men, the neighboring galantine honoring the French statesman Casimir-Perier and this one a Waddington, a surname borne by a politician of the period; Ranhofer rarely explains his dedications, and the pairing of the two entries suggests they were built to stand on the same table. Galantine itself is old French kitchen vocabulary for boned poultry or game, poached in its own jelly and served cold in slices, and by the 1890s such a piece was as much architecture as food, judged from across the room and often barely eaten. Pheasant and young rabbit both came from a game trade that supplied restaurants far more freely than modern licensing allows, which is why a book like this treats them as ordinary market goods.