No. 2480

Cutlets of Woodcock a la Sarah Bernhardt

Cotelettes de Becasses a la Sarah Bernhardt

Take seven or eight fresh round Perigord truffles, all of equal size and very clean; peel, salt and cook them for seven or eight minutes in a little Madeira wine and leave them to cool off in this liquid. Remove all the meats from three woodcock roasted rare, keeping aside three or four of the fillets; pound the remainder of the meats with a part of the cooked intestines and three-quarters as much cooked foies-gras; season and rub through a sieve; put this puree into a vessel and beat it up for two minutes with a spoon, incorporating into it slowly four spoonfuls of good melted game glaze (No. 398) and one gill of liquid brown chaudfroid sauce (No. 594) reduced with game fumet (No. 397) and essence of truffles (No. 395); when all is well mingled add gradually to the preparation two and a half ounces of fresh butter, wiped and divided into small pats; the whole should now be very smooth without being frothy. Drain the truffles, stand them upright on a cloth to mark the tops with a tube from a column box an inch in diameter; remove this marked piece and empty the truffles out with a vegetable spoon; pound these removed pieces with as much cooked foies-gras, season the preparation and lay it in a bowl to beat up for a few moments so as to have it smooth. Prepare a montglas with half of the woodcock fillets laid aside, and an equal quantity of red beef tongue mingled with a little good reduced and thick Madeira sauce (No. 413). Moisten with a brush dipped in cold jelly a dozen tin cutlet-shaped molds, cover the bottoms and sides with the woodcock preparation, leaving an empty space in the center; fill this up with some of the cold montglas; cover with more of the preparation and smooth it at once; keep the molds for one hour on ice, then unmold them and cover with a layer of brown chaudfroid sauce (No. 594). Put a few spoonfuls of this chaudfroid sauce into a vessel, thicken it while stirring on ice and mix with it the remainder of the woodcock fillets cut in small dice and twice as much cooked foies-gras cut the same; use this preparation for stuffing the emptied truffles; range them as soon as done on a small baking sheet and close the opening with a round piece of cooked foies-gras cut out with the same tube used for marking the truffles; glaze over the whole with a brush; keep this baking sheet on ice for half an hour. Harden a thick layer of jelly on a dish and on top of it set a narrow wooden foundation covered with white paper; on this dress the truffles piled in a pyramidical form, then push chopped jelly through a cornet into all the intersections, as well as around the truffles, to maintain them in position. Around this board dress the cutlets in a circle after inserting a fancy favor frill (No. 10) into each.

← No. 2479 Cutlets of Woodcock, Poniatowski The Cold Service No. 2481 Lobster Dome Garnished with Small Cases →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a competition-grade cold buffet piece from Delmonico's kitchen, built out of half a dozen other recipes cross-referenced by number. Beyond the labour, it rests on two things a modern kitchen cannot reproduce: a legal supply of woodcock, and a food-safety standard that no longer applies.

Rare game held cold for hoursRare game held cold -- The whole structure begins with three woodcock roasted rare, pounded raw-centred into a puree, moulded, chilled and set on a jelly-covered dish. Wild birds can carry campylobacter and salmonella, and nothing in the method brings the meat to a temperature that would kill them; the recipe relies entirely on ice and on prompt service.
The intestinesWoodcock is traditionally cooked undrawn and the trail — the intestines — is eaten as a delicacy. Here the recipe calls for "a part of the cooked intestines" to go into the forcemeat, from a bird roasted rare. Gut contents are where enteric pathogens concentrate.
Legality of the birdAmerican woodcock is a migratory game bird. It may be taken in season by licensed hunters but wild-taken birds cannot be bought or sold in the United States. European rules vary by country: sale of wild woodcock in season is permitted in some jurisdictions and banned in others, so check local law before assuming a source is lawful.
Perigord trufflesTuber melanosporum, hollowed out and stuffed. Seven or eight large, round, identical black truffles is a several-hundred-dollar proposition today, and the recipe treats them as a structural element rather than a seasoning.
What the cross-references areGame glaze (No. 398) is game stock reduced to a syrup; fumet (No. 397) a concentrated game essence; chaudfroid (No. 594) a sauce set with aspic so it coats and holds; montglas a dice of tongue and game bound in reduced Madeira sauce. A gill is half a cup.
The tin cutlet moulds and the frillsThe finished pieces are shaped to look like cutlets, each finished with a "fancy favor frill" — a nineteenth-century convention of dressing a forcemeat to resemble the joint it came from. The wooden foundation under the truffle pyramid, covered with white paper, is scaffolding, not something served.
If you want the effectA cold game terrine or a chaudfroid of farmed poultry, made to a current recipe with properly cooked meat and measured chilling, gets you the same period silhouette without the hazard.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for most of the second half of the nineteenth century, and The Epicurean (1894) is the record of it — some 3,500 numbered recipes, many named for the customers and celebrities the house wished to flatter. Sarah Bernhardt toured the United States repeatedly from 1880 onward and was among the most photographed and most feted people alive; a dish in her name was a form of publicity that ran in both directions. Woodcock was the aristocrat of the game list in this period, prized precisely for the trail that modern practice avoids, and its appearance in the Cold Service section — hollowed truffles, chaudfroid, a pyramid held together with chopped aspic piped from a paper cornet — marks this as a piece montee for the buffet table, meant to be looked at as much as eaten. The style belongs to the same decorative tradition Careme codified earlier in the century and Escoffier would spend his career simplifying away.CAUTION_SET_ABOVE_APPLIES</json>