No. 2453

Chaudfroid of Young Guinea Fowls

Chaudfroid de Jeunes Pintades

In order to dress this entree solidly it will be found necessary to unmold a border of very smooth and hard jelly on a dish decorated at the bottom with a few fanciful cuts of truffle and egg-whites; coat over the mold and fill the inside of this border with a foundation made of wood or stearine covered over with white paper and having fastened on to its center a column-shaped wooden support; enlarge this especially toward the bottom with thick chopped-up jelly and keep the dish on ice. Truss three small, clean young guinea fowls; cook them in the pan, keeping them quite rare and let them get partly cold in their own stock, then drain them off and carve in five pieces; remove the upper breastbones and the fillets, and lay these under a light weight till cold. Suppress also the thick second joint bone, leaving on the drumstick only; cut this much shorter, and place the legs under a weight to cool. Pare the pieces nicely, suppressing all the skin; dip them singly into a blond chaudfroid sauce (No. 596), lifting them out with a large fork, and range them at once on a baking sheet, some distance apart from each other so as to harden the sauce. Now take them off this sheet to cut away the surplus of sauce and dress them pyramidically against the support in the center of the dish, the legs underneath and the fillets and upper breast parts on top, being careful that this pyramid does not incline toward the jelly but leans against the support, which must also be covered with paper. Mask the pieces of chicken with half-set jelly laid on with a brush, and keep the dish on ice for twenty minutes before serving.

← No. 2452 Chaudfroid of Doe Bird, Plovers, Bustards or The Cold Service No. 2454 Chaudfroid of Larks →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a competition-style cold buffet piece from the Delmonico's kitchen, and two things in it put it outside modern practice: the birds are deliberately left rare and then served cold, and the whole construction rests on an inedible socle. The notes below explain the mechanics and where the recipe fails.

Rare poultry, served coldThe instruction to cook the guinea fowls "quite rare," cool them in their own stock, then coat and hold them on ice means the meat never reaches a temperature that would deal with Salmonella or Campylobacter. Slow cooling in stock, and the handling the assembly requires, favour bacterial growth. Use a current recipe if you want to serve cold poultry in aspic.
Stearine and the wooden socleThe "foundation made of wood or stearine" is a display plinth, not food. Stearine is rendered fat pressed into hard candle stock; period kitchens carved it into pedestals and coated it in white paper precisely because nobody was meant to eat it. Anything of the sort must be fully wrapped and physically separated from the food.
Chaudfroid sauceNo. 596 is the "blond" chaudfroid, a pale sauce set with jelly. It is used at the point where it coats the back of a spoon but has not yet gelled — too warm and it runs off, too cool and it goes lumpy. The pieces are dipped, drained on a sheet to set, then trimmed of the sauce that pools at the edge.
"Cook them in the pan"This most likely stands for poêler: the trussed birds cooked covered in a pan rather than roasted dry or poached. The stock they cool in is the resulting pan liquid.
Guinea fowl sizeA young guinea fowl (pintadeau) runs about 1½–2 lb, roughly a large poussin. Three of them carved into five pieces each gives fifteen pieces, which is what the pyramid is built from — a centrepiece for perhaps eight to twelve at a buffet.
The five piecesEach bird gives two legs and two breast fillets plus the "upper breast" section. The second joint (thigh) bone is removed and the drumstick shortened so the pieces sit flat; weighting them while they cool is what keeps the surfaces even enough to take an unbroken coat of sauce.
Half-set jellyThe final glaze is aspic brushed on at the point where it has begun to thicken but still flows. Applied too warm it dissolves the chaudfroid coating underneath; the twenty minutes on ice is to set that final layer, not to chill the dish through.

A Little History

Chaudfroid — literally "hot-cold," a dish cooked hot and served cold under a set sauce — was one of the defining forms of nineteenth-century cuisine froide, and Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the record of his decades at Delmonico's in New York, devotes a long run of numbered entries to it: doe bird and plovers before this one, larks after. The guinea fowl, pintade, is a West African bird kept by the Romans and reintroduced to European poultry yards by Portuguese traders; by Ranhofer's day it was a fashionable game-flavoured alternative to chicken on American menus. What the recipe really documents is the architecture of the grand buffet: the jelly border, the papered wooden column, the pyramid leaning deliberately away from the aspic so it will not collapse into it. The eating was almost secondary to the standing up.