No. 2525

Hams of Chicken with Zampino

Jambons de Poulet Garnis de Zampino

Bone thoroughly two good chickens weighing two pounds each, leaving on only the drumstick bones; separate each one in two lengthwise, season and fill each half with galantine forcemeat (No. 65) and long shreds of cooked veal udder, also of very red beef tongue, raw foies-gras and quartered raw truffles, proceeding exactly the same as for boned chicken (No. 2485); bring the meats close together in order to sew up and wrap each of the halved boned chickens in a white cloth; cook for one hour in unskimmed white broth (No. 194a); drain the galantines and unwrap; lay on a baking sheet some bottomless molds in the shape of hams, having a slot in the thin end to allow the drumstick to pass through, place the chickens in these and let get cold under the pressure of a light weight. Pare and disengage the pinion bone. They may now be cut in slices, reconstructing them as before, and keeping in shape with a thin skewer; cover the entire surface with white chaudfroid sauce (No. 596), that has become slightly thickened on ice. After this sauce is cold cover over the hams on the drumstick end with brown chaudfroid (No. 594), imitating the real skin of a pared ham; trim each ham bone with a frill (No. 10); dress them two by two on a rice foundation, withdraw the skewers and decorate the hams with fanciful cuts of very black truffles; surround with thin slices of zampino three inches in diameter and cut in two across and dress them around the foundation, one overlapping the other. Surround with a piping of chopped jelly and some jelly croutons.

Zampino of Modena.-Take one leg of a fresh pig about fifteen inches long, leaving the foot adhering; bone it carefully not to split the skin, turn the skin back and then remove the meat and fat; salt the skin plentifully, and leave it in brine for four to five days. After this time chop up coarsely ten pounds of lean pork meat with five pounds of beef, and mix these with five pounds of very finely chopped fresh pork rind. Season the mixture with ten ounces of salt, one ounce of crushed black pepper corns, a heavy pinch of cinnamon, a small pinch of saltpeter and one gill of red wine; mingle thoroughly. Now wash the skin in fresh water to extract all the salt, turn it over to its normal position, and fill it with the above mixture; tie it firmly at the extreme end, and enwrap with a strong inch-wide tape, beginning at the smallest end of the zampino (that is, near the foot). Lay the zampino in a large kettle, cover plentifully with cold water, and stand it on a slow fire to have the liquid almost reach boiling point; then remove the kettle to a corner of the range and let barely bubble for an hour and a half to an hour and three quarters. Take from the fire and leave to cool in the liquid; drain and remove the tape. This zampino can be served hot with string beans as described in No. 1820.

← No. 2524 English Ham with Jelly Garnishings for Cold Dishes No. 2526 Miscellaneous Cold Hatelets, Bellevue Vegeta →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a two-part showpiece from the cold buffet: boned chicken galantines molded into ham shapes, served with slices of house-made zampino. The galantine half is period-standard charcuterie work; the zampino half is an uncured-to-modern-standards stuffed pig's trotter, and that is where the recipe stops being reproducible.

The saltpeter is unmeasured"A small pinch" of saltpeter for twenty pounds of meat is not a quantity. Nitrate curing salts have a narrow effective range: too little gives no protection against Clostridium botulinum in a dense, tied, low-oxygen casing, too much is toxic. Modern charcuterie uses weighed curing salt at a fixed percentage of meat weight, and no responsible version of this can be scaled from a pinch.
The skin brine has no temperature and no strengthThe boned pig's leg is "salted plentifully" and left in brine four to five days, with no salinity, no weight of salt, and no holding temperature. In a nineteenth-century larder that meant a cold cellar; in a modern kitchen it is four to five days of unrefrigerated meat with an unknown salt concentration.
The cooking is deliberately below a boilThe zampino is brought to "almost" boiling and then held so it "barely bubbles" for an hour and a half to an hour and three quarters. That produces the right texture, but no thermometer reading is given, so the internal temperature at the centre of a stuffed trotter several inches thick is unverified.
Cooling in the liquidLeaving a large mass of meat to cool in its own broth passes slowly through the temperature band where surviving spore-formers multiply; it is one of the practices modern food safety specifically targets.
Raw foies-gras and truffles in the forcemeatThe galantine is stuffed with raw liver and raw truffle, then simmered one hour in broth and pressed cold. This part is closer to workable, but it is served cold from a buffet and the recipe gives no chilling instruction beyond "let get cold" — again, no temperature, no time.
Ingredients you will not findCooked veal udder is essentially unobtainable outside specialist butchers. Chaudfroid is a velouté or brown sauce set with aspic and applied while syrupy on ice; the frill (No. 10) is the paper cuff for the exposed bone. A gill is half a cup.
If you want zamponeBuy it. Zampone di Modena is made commercially under a protected designation and sold pre-cooked or ready to poach, and a current recipe should be used for any home charcuterie.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put this in The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of his thirty-odd years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and it is pure cold-buffet theater: chickens boned, stuffed, cooked, pressed in bottomless ham molds, coated in two colors of chaudfroid so that one end mimics the pared rind of a real ham, then finished with cut truffle and a paper frill on the drumstick. The garnish is zampone, the stuffed pig's trotter of Modena, whose invention is traditionally traced to the 1511 siege of Mirandola — the story goes that the defenders packed their remaining pork into a trotter skin for want of casings — though the tale is legend rather than documented history. What the entry really records is the scale of a Gilded Age hotel kitchen: a garnish here means curing twenty pounds of meat in a boned pig's leg, and the finished platter exists to be looked at across a room before anyone eats it.