No. 2452

Chaudfroid of Doe Bird, Plovers, Bustards or Woodcock with Fumet

Chaudfroid de Courlis, Pluviers, Vanneaux on Becasses au Fumet

Pick, singe and clean nicely eight doe birds; draw and truss them for roasting like plovers (No. 2119); put them to roast, remove, and when cold detach the breasts, suppress the skin and cut each breast in three pieces-one breastbone and the two wings. Break up the fragments and put them in a saucepan with minced shallots and carrots, parsley; thyme and bay leaf, moisten with white wine, stock (No. 194a), and espagnole sauce (No. 414); boil, skim and simmer for thirty minutes, then strain; remove all the fat and reduce to half-glaze, adding jelly; pour this sauce into a tin basin and leave to cool on ice while stirring unceasingly until it becomes the proper consistency. Dip each one of the pieces of bird into this chaudfroid to cover with a thick layer, and when thoroughly cold brush them over with half-set jelly. Decorate a border mold with fanciful cuts of truffles and egg-whites, coat it with a thick layer of jelly, and fill with a well-seasoned macedoine (No.2650) garnishing dressed with jellied mayonnaise (No. 613); unmold it as soon as it is cold, and fill the center with a pad of rice; on this have a sloping pyramid of rice; cover this over with thick jelly forced through a pocket. Dress the chaudfroids, leaning them against the pyramid and holding them up with sticky jelly forced through a cornet; on top insert a Bellevue hatelet (No. 2526) and place fine jelly croutons around the border; push chopped jelly into all the intersections between the chaudfroids. Proceed the same for plovers, woodcock or bustards.

← No. 2451 Chaudfroid of Chicken a la Clara Morris The Cold Service No. 2453 Chaudfroid of Young Guinea Fowls →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

The technique here is standard cold-buffet work, but the birds are the problem: nearly every species named is now legally off limits in North America and Europe. What follows explains the terms and the obstacle rather than a way around it.

"Doe bird" means curlewThe French heading gives it away: courlis is curlew. In nineteenth-century American market slang "doe bird" or "dough bird" most often meant the Eskimo curlew, a shorebird hunted commercially in enormous numbers and now considered extinct or functionally so. No legal source exists.
Plovers and lapwingsShorebirds sold by the barrel in 1890s markets are protected in the United States and Canada under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and equivalent later law, and the lapwing (vanneau) is protected in much of Europe, though it remains a huntable species in a few countries. In the United States and Canada, possession without a permit is an offence.
BustardsThe great bustard was shot out of Britain in the nineteenth century and remains a protected species everywhere it survives; several Asian bustards are critically endangered. This is not a bird that can be sourced at all.
WoodcockThe one partial exception. Woodcock remain a legal quarry species in some places under licence and season, but they are not sold as food in the United States, where the sale of wild-shot game is prohibited. If you want cold game chaudfroid, work from a current recipe using farmed poultry or game birds.
What a chaudfroid actually isFor reference: a sauce, here an espagnole-based game fumet fortified with aspic, chilled over ice while stirred so it thickens to a coating consistency, then set on cold cooked meat and glazed with half-set jelly. Ranhofer's "tin basin" is simply a metal bowl, which chills faster than china.
Fumet, macedoine, hateletA fumet is a concentrated stock made from the carcass and trimmings. A macedoine is small-diced mixed vegetables, here bound with jellied mayonnaise. A hatelet is a decorative silver skewer, purely ornamental and standard on Delmonico's cold display pieces.
ScaleEight birds yield twenty-four pieces, arranged against a rice pyramid inside an unmolded border. This is a banquet centrepiece for a long buffet table, not a plated course.

A Little History

This is Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the record of some thirty years' cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and the Cold Service chapters are its most period-specific pages: whole sections devoted to dishes built for display on a buffet, coated in aspic, propped on rice pads and pinned with silver skewers. What dates the recipe beyond the styling is the shopping list. In the 1880s and 1890s American markets sold wild shorebirds by weight alongside poultry, and curlew, plover and lapwing appear in game dealers' price lists as ordinary commodities; the Eskimo curlew in particular was shipped east in such volume that it collapsed within a generation and has not been reliably recorded since the 1960s. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended the trade, and with it a whole category of restaurant cookery. Recipes like this one survive as evidence of how much of the wild was once considered market produce.