No. 2461

Chaudfroid of Snipe in Pyramid

Chaudfroid de Becassines en Buisson

Dress this entree on a wooden dish bottom, composed of three shelves, all to be covered with white paper. Bone fifteen to eighteen small snipe, keeping the heads and a part of the intestines aside, the latter to be cooked in melted butter and pressed through a sieve. Scald the heads, pick out the eyes, replace them with a little forcemeat and a round of truffle to imitate the original; place in the oven to poach the forcemeat. Spread the snipe out on the table, season and cover with a layer of game galantine forcemeat (No. 66). Put in the center of each one a piece of raw foies-gras and a piece of cooked truffle, cover with another layer of the forcemeat, then roll the boned snipe into ball shapes. Cover each one with a separate piece of buttered paper and range them in a narrow sautoir lined with fat pork; moisten to their height with good stock (No. 194a) and cover with more of the pork, then put on the lid and let cook slowly for twenty-five minutes; leave them to cool in their own stock. Unwrap the snipe, pare and shape them properly and fill with foies-gras any crevices that may have been caused by the cooking. Pare them all alike and of a nice shape. Range them at once on a small baking sheet and put aside in a cool place for a quarter of an hour; take them up one by one and dip them in a brown chaudfroid sauce (No. 594) thickened on ice so that they are entirely covered, and return them immediately to the sheet to drain off the sauce, and keep cold for another half hour, then pare them once more of any surplus of sauce. At the last moment force some sticky chopped jelly through a pocket between the shelves, dress the snipe over, letting them form into a pyramid, and between each one dress one of the heads, and glaze it over with a brush. Push a thick rope of chopped jelly around the pyramid on the bottom of the dish and surround this with fine croutons. Cover the snipe lightly with jelly applied with a brush, so as to render them glossy.

← No. 2460 Chaudfroid of Fillets of Redhead Duck and Ve The Cold Service No. 2462 Chaudfroid of Turkey a la Perigord →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A full Escoffier-era buffet piece: eighteen boned birds stuffed, poached, glazed and stacked on a papered tiered stand. Almost none of it is difficult, but every step depends on the cross-referenced numbers and on working cold.

The hinge: temperature of the sauceBrown chaudfroid (No. 594) is a brown sauce set with jelly and "thickened on ice" — it must be cool enough to coat like napping cream but still fluid. Too warm and it runs off in streaks; too cool and it sets in lumps on the spoon. Stir it over ice, test on a chilled spoon, and re-warm gently over water if it tightens.
SnipeWilson's snipe cannot be bought in the United States — the sale of wild-shot game birds is prohibited, so the only source is a licensed hunter's own bag. Farmed quail, at about 4-5 oz dressed, is the usual substitute and bones out the same way, though the heads are far smaller and the trail is not eaten.
"A part of the intestines"The trail — the intestine of woodcock and snipe — was traditionally cooked and sieved as a seasoning paste, on the long-standing but folkloric grounds that these birds' intestines are clean. Modern quail and any commercially processed bird are eviscerated, so this element simply drops out; a little sieved chicken liver cooked in butter stands in for the flavour, not the tradition.
Sautoir and fat porkA sautoir is a straight-sided sauté pan. "Lined with fat pork" means sheets of fresh pork back fat or unsmoked fatback, not bacon — smoke would dominate. Line the bottom, lay in the wrapped birds, cover with more fat, add stock (No. 194 a, the book's own cross-reference for good stock) to their height, lid on, and hold at a bare shiver, not a simmer, for the twenty-five minutes.
Raw foie gras insideThe piece of raw foie gras is enclosed in forcemeat and is intended to cook during the poach. Expect it to render; the recipe accordingly tells you to fill with foie gras any crevices left after cooking and paring.
Working time and food safetyThis is a long sequence of handling at room temperature: dip, drain, chill fifteen to thirty minutes, pare, dip again. Do the paring and dipping in short shifts with the tray going back to the refrigerator between them, and keep the finished pyramid cold until it goes out. The dish was built for a chilled larder, not a warm kitchen.
The jelly and the stand"Sticky chopped jelly" is set aspic chopped fine and piped through a pastry bag; it works as edible mortar between the tiers. Modern aspic from a clear game or veal stock with sheet gelatine behaves the same. The "fine croutons" bordering the base are not specified in the text; in this cold service they are as likely to be cut shapes of jelly as bread.
Yield and serviceFifteen to eighteen birds serves fifteen to eighteen at a cold buffet, one bird each. Nothing about the construction scales down gracefully below about eight; below that, dress the birds on a single glazed platter and skip the tiers.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some three decades associated, with interruptions, with the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and the cold service section is the part of the book that shows most plainly what a nineteenth-century restaurant buffet was for: not eating so much as display. A buisson — literally a bush or thicket — is the classical French term for any dish piled into a pyramid on a tiered support, and a chaudfroid is meat cooked hot and served cold under a set sauce, a technique generally traced to French practice of the eighteenth century and standardised in the nineteenth. Snipe and woodcock were then everyday market game in America; the market gunning that supplied restaurants like Delmonico's collapsed populations badly enough that Congress passed the Lacey Act of 1900, barring interstate transport of illegally taken game, with the market itself ending only through later state laws and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which is why this recipe reads today as a document of a food supply that no longer exists. The eyes replaced with truffle rounds, the heads glazed and set between the birds, the papered wooden shelves — all of it belongs to a service in which the platter was carried through the room before anyone was given a plate.