No. 2499

Galantine of Turkey a la Berger—Boned Turkey

Galantine a la Berger

Bone a small turkey after having cut off the wings, the legs and the neck. Begin by cutting the skin down its entire length, commencing from the middle of the neck and ending at the middle of the rump, using a small thin knife and following the outlines of the rib bones; then remove the breast bone and the second joint bones, suppress the meat from the latter and chop it up finely; remove all sinews from the fillets, cut away a part of their thickness and place them where the legs were taken from. Prepare a well-seasoned chopped forcemeat (No. 65), mix well together, adding half a gill of brandy, truffle essence (No. 395) and one ounce of chopped truffles. Cut half a pound of fat pork into half-inch squares, blanch and drain; have also half a pound of unsmoked red beef tongue cut in half-inch squares, five ounces of peeled truffles cut in pieces, and three-quarters of a pound of duck or goose livers, parboiled, cold and cut in half-inch dice. With this and the forcemeat stuff the turkey, then wrap it up in a cloth and let cook in some good stock for two hours. Drain off well, take off the cloth and wrap it up again before setting under the press. When thoroughly cold unwrap, pare and cover with a white fecula chaudfroid sauce (No. 593), and decorate with fanciful cuts of very black truffles and pistachios dipped in half-set jelly; as soon as this is quite hard, cover with half-set jelly and dress on a trimmed crouton of cooked hominy or rice. Garnish around with chopped jelly and have an outside border of jelly croutons. Stick one Bellevue hatelet (No.2526) in the center of the turkey, and two garnished hatelets (No. 2526) on each side.

GARNISHINGS FOR COLD DISHES (Garnitures Pour Pieces Froides).

← No. 2498 Galantine of Suckling Pig The Cold Service No. 2500 Garnishing of Artichoke Bottoms Filled with →

For the Modern Kitchen

A full-dress cold buffet piece from Delmonico's kitchen: a boned, stuffed, poached and pressed turkey, glazed and decorated. The cooking is straightforward; the difficulty is the boning and the cold finishing, and the cross-references to other numbered recipes mean this entry cannot be worked from in isolation.

The hinge: keep the skin wholeEverything depends on removing the carcass through a single cut down the back without piercing the skin, since that skin is the casing that holds the galantine together under pressure. Work with a short, flexible boning knife, keep the blade angled against the bone rather than the flesh, and take the wings, legs and neck off first as directed so you are wrestling only the body.
Half a gill of brandyA gill is half a cup, so this is 4 tablespoons (about 60 ml) for a whole turkey's worth of forcemeat.
Cross-referenced componentsNo. 65 is Ranhofer's chopped forcemeat, No. 395 the truffle essence, No. 593 the white chaudfroid thickened with fecula (a fine starch), and No. 2526 the hatelets. Without those numbers in front of you the recipe is incomplete; a modern equivalent is a well-seasoned veal-and-pork farce, a good truffle-infused stock reduction, and a white chaudfroid built on velouté plus aspic.
Unsmoked red beef tongueThis is brine-cured (saltpetre-pink) tongue, boiled and skinned but not smoked. A cooked, unsmoked pickled tongue from a deli counter is the direct substitute; smoked tongue will dominate the truffle.
Fat pork and duck livers"Fat pork" is unsmoked salt pork or fresh back fat, blanched to draw the salt and firm it for dicing. The three-quarters of a pound of parboiled duck or goose liver is ordinary liver, not foie gras, though foie gras cubes are a legitimate luxury reading of the line.
Poaching, not boilingThe two hours applies to a small turkey, wrapped tight in cloth and tied; the book gives no weight. Hold the stock at a bare shiver, around 175F, and go by an internal temperature of 165F at the centre of the forcemeat rather than by the clock, since the roll's diameter matters more than its weight.
Pressing and chillingRewrap in a fresh cloth while hot, then press under a board with moderate weight and get it into the refrigerator promptly; do not let a mass this size cool slowly at room temperature. It needs overnight under pressure to slice cleanly.
The crouton baseA "crouton" here is not bread but a shaped plinth of firm cooked hominy or rice, spread in a tray, chilled solid, then cut and trimmed to carry the galantine. The hatelets are decorative skewers, purely for display, and are pulled before serving.
YieldA small boned turkey stuffed this heavily will cut into a large number of cold buffet slices, though the book gives no yield; treat any serving count as a guess. Keep it refrigerated and eat it within a few days.

A Little History

This is No. 2499 in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the encyclopedic record of his thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it belongs to the section on cold work, the branch of the kitchen that produced the mirrored buffet centrepieces of the period. The word galantine is generally traced to Old French forms related to gelatine, and the technique is medieval in outline: bone a bird, rebuild it around a farce, poach it in its own rich stock and let the natural gelatin set it firm. By the nineteenth century it had become a test piece for the garde-manger, judged as much on the chaudfroid coat and the cut-truffle decoration as on flavor. The scale here—tongue, truffles, livers, brandy and silver skewers stuck into the finished bird—reflects a restaurant serving banquets where a cold dish sat on the sideboard as an ornament for the length of the meal before anyone ate it.