No. 2486

Galantine of Chicken a la d'Orleans

Galantine de Poulet a la d'Orleans

Bone two young chickens weighing two pounds each; leave on only the white meat adhering to the breasts, and suppress the leg meats; remove some of the breast meat adhering to the skin and place it where the skin is bare. These chickens when boned and stuffed should only weigh two pounds and a half each. Fill them with quenelle forcemeat (No. 89), into which mix a salpicon of truffles, pistachios, tongue and foies-gras, all cut in quarter-inch squares; let cook in a stock (No. 194a) for two hours, unwrap, wash out the cloths and rewrap them as before; hang them up by one end on a hook, and to the other end fasten a sufficiently heavy weight; leave them hanging for twelve hours; unwrap and pare them alike, then cover with an ordinary white chaudfroid (No. 596); decorate the tops with fanciful designs of truffles dipped in half-set jelly so they adhere well to the galantines; when thoroughly fastened coat over with jelly spread over with a funnel made for this purpose (Fig. 759), and stand them against the support; place one on each side. The cup is filled with small truffles. Arrange some square of jelly around the support, and chopped jelly between the support and croutons, as shown in the drawing.

← No. 2485b Truffle Decorations The Cold Service No. 2487 Galantine of Duckling, Pear-Shaped →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A full cold-buffet showpiece from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen, written for cooks who had the rest of the book at hand. Almost every element is a cross-reference, and the assembly assumes a garde-manger with aspic, a decorating funnel and a carved support to lean the galantines against.

The cross-referencesNo. 89 is Ranhofer's quenelle forcemeat, essentially pounded raw chicken or veal with panada, egg and cream; No. 194a is the cooking stock the recipe sends the galantines into; No. 596 is chaudfroid sauce, a velouté-based white sauce set with aspic jelly. Any modern equivalent of the three will carry the dish.
The hinge: poach, never boilThe galantine goes into stock that should sit at 170-180F and stay there. A rolling boil swells and splits the forcemeat, drives the fat out of the foie gras, and leaves the slice grey and grainy rather than close and pink.
Cook to temperature, not to the clockTwo hours suits two 2.5 lb rolls in a large pot of barely trembling stock. Judge it on an instant-read thermometer into the centre of the forcemeat rather than on the two hours; a stuffed poultry roll is done at 165F.
Chill it cold before you press itHanging a cooked, weighted galantine in open air for twelve hours assumed a cold larder. Do the same job in the refrigerator: cool the wrapped roll quickly, then press it flat under a weighted board or in a mould overnight. Twelve hours at modern room temperature is squarely in the range where Clostridium perfringens multiplies in cooked meat.
Boning and weightBone each bird leaving the skin in one sheet; the instruction to shift breast meat onto the bare patches is what gives you an even sheet of meat to roll. The stated finished weight of 2.5 lb per bird is how you judge how much forcemeat goes in, since the boned bird -- with the leg meat suppressed -- weighs a good deal less than the 2 lb it started at.
The clothWrap tightly in scalded cheesecloth or a linen napkin and tie at both ends and along the length, like a sausage. Some modern kitchens wrap first in plastic film and then in cloth, which keeps the roll cylindrical and stops stock washing the surface fat away.
Salpicon and substitutionsSalpicon here simply means the quarter-inch dice. Pistachios should be blanched and skinned so the dark skins do not mark the pale forcemeat; tongue means cured, pressed ox tongue for its colour. Fresh black truffle is the intended article, but a good jarred summer truffle carries the decoration if not the perfume.
Aspic workThe decorating "funnel" is a small aspic cone for flooding a chilled, chaudfroid-coated surface with a thin, even glaze. Everything must be cold: the galantine, the plate and the truffle cut-outs, with the jelly cooled to the point of syrup before it goes on.
YieldTwo galantines of this size cut into perhaps thirty to forty slices -- a buffet piece for twenty or more, not a dinner for four.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and the Cold Service chapter is the part of the book most obviously written for the display table rather than the household. Galantine -- the word is generally traced to Old French forms related to gelatine, and the dish is defined by the jelly that sets around it -- was the classic garde-manger exercise: a bird boned out whole, restuffed richer than it began, poached, pressed and then decorated in white sauce and aspic so that the finished object looked nothing like poultry. Suffixes such as a la d'Orleans functioned as menu shorthand for a particular garnish and presentation rather than a place of origin, and Ranhofer used dozens of them. The instruction to lean the two galantines against a carved support with a cup of small truffles between them is a reminder that this food was built to be looked at down the length of a banquet table, carved late in the evening if at all.