No. 379

Puree of Chicken, Partridge, Grouse or Roebuck

Puree de Poulet, Perdreau, Tetras ou Chevreuil

Raise the fillets from a roast chicken or from either two partridges or two grouse, or else one pound of the saddle of roasted venison, pound them, add four ounces of bread-crumbs, previously soaked in chicken or game broth and squeezed thoroughly, pound again and dilute this puree with simply lightly salted chicken or game broth, free of any spices, aromatics or vegetables. Strain through a sieve and warm it up without boiling, adding two ounces of butter, stirring it in well; moisten with either chicken or game broth, letting it remain sufficiently liquid so as to be easily drank from cups.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A drinkable meat purée from the invalid-cookery chapter of Ranhofer's The Epicurean — essentially a strong broth thickened with pounded roast meat and bread. It comes together quickly if the roast is already cooked.

Never let it boilOnce the meat pur he pan below a simmer: hot to the finger but never bubbling. Boiling makes the pounded protein seize into grains that no amount of straining will smooth out, and it splits the butter.
Pounding, then and nowThe original assumes a mortar and a sieve. A food processor does the pounding in seconds; pulse the meat with the squeezed bread until it is a smooth paste, then thin it gradually with warm broth.
WeightsFour ounces of bread-crumbs is about two cups of fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, weighed dry before soaking. Two ounces of butter is four tablespoons.
The straining is not optionalPush the diluted purée through a fine-mesh sieve with a ladle or rubber spatula. Sinew and any residual grain of meat stay behind, and the result is what makes it drinkable rather than merely thin.
Deliberately bland brothRanhofer specifies broth "free of any spices, aromatics or vegetables" and only lightly salted — this was food for the sick, whose digestion was thought to be irritated by seasoning. Cooking for the well, season the finished purée to taste; the dish is dull otherwise.
RoebuckThe roe deer of European game markets, not sold in North America. Any lean roast venison loin or saddle works; a pound of cooked meat, trimmed of all silverskin.
Consistency and yieldAim for thin cream; it should pour freely from a cup. The recipe fixes no quantity of broth, so the yield depends on how far you dilute it; it thickens as it stands, so keep extra warm broth at hand.
Serving vesselCups, not bowls, and warmed. The whole point of the preparation is that it needs neither spoon nor chewing.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it includes a full chapter of broths and soups for invalids — a feature found in a number of nineteenth-century professional cookbooks, since a great restaurant was expected to send nourishment to sickrooms as well as dinners to dining rooms. The reasoning behind these purées appears to belong to a medical tradition that is often said to have treated concentrated meat essence as the most digestible form of strength, and to have regarded spices, aromatics and vegetables as irritants to be withheld from the ill; hence the insistence here on broth without any of them. The game options are not luxury for its own sake: partridge, grouse and venison were reportedly considered lighter and more "restorative" than beef or pork, an idea generally traced to the humoral dietetics of much earlier centuries and still repeated in household manuals well into the 1900s. The technique — pound, bind with soaked bread, dilute, sieve — is the old European purée, a mortar preparation.