No. 395

Truffle Essence

Essence de Truffes

Brush and peel two pounds of fresh truffles; put them into a saucepan with half a bottle of Madeira wine and a pint of broth (No. 187), add two ounces of celery, as much carrots and as much onions, all minced up very fine, a bunch of parsley, thyme, bay leaf, salt and ground pepper. Cover the saucepan and allow the truffles to boil slowly for twenty minutes. Then let them get cold in their broth, keeping the cover hermetically closed. Strain through a napkin or fine sieve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

An aromatic extraction rather than a dish: two pounds of truffles are simmered briefly in fortified wine and stock, then left to cool sealed so nothing volatile escapes. Everything here serves that one purpose.

The hinge is the cooling, not the cookingTruffle aroma is carried by highly volatile compounds that leave with the steam. The twenty-minute simmer must be barely trembling, lid on, and the pan must then cool undisturbed and tightly covered so the vapour condenses back into the liquid. Lifting the lid to check costs you the point of the recipe.
Half a bottle of MadeiraA nineteenth-century wine bottle is close to the modern 750 ml, so this is about 1 1/2 cups. Use a dry or medium-dry Sercial or Verdelho, not the sweetened cooking Madeira sold in supermarkets, which is salted.
Broth No. 187Ranhofer's cross-reference is to one of his basic broths; treat it as a light, lightly seasoned stock. Any unsalted light chicken or veal stock does the job; salt is added separately here, so a salted commercial stock may push the finished essence over.
Fresh truffles versus jarredThe recipe calls for fresh truffles, brushed and peeled; peelings could be put to use in forcemeats and sauces rather than thrown out. Jarred or canned truffles have already given much of their aroma to their own packing juice; if that is all you have, use the juice as part of the liquid and expect a thinner result.
Straining through a napkinA clean linen napkin wrung out in cold water, or a double layer of damp cheesecloth in a sieve, catches the fine grit that clings to truffle skin. Do not press the solids through; let it drip.
The truffles are not wasteThe strained truffles still carry some flavour and can be sliced into garnishes, salpicons and sauces rather than discarded, though much of their aroma has gone into the liquid.
Yield and keepingThe Madeira and broth together come to roughly 3 1/2 cups before cooking, so expect somewhat less than that once the truffles have taken up their share. "Hermetically closed" here means a tight lid for aroma, not preserving: this is a low-acid liquid and belongs in the refrigerator for a few days, or frozen in ice-cube trays and used a spoonful at a time to finish sauces off the heat.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working system set down in print, which is why a page like this reads as a component rather than a dish. Essences occupy a whole class in classical French practice: concentrated flavour liquids held on hand to be added at the last moment to a sauce, a salpicon or a consomm acute{e}, so the finished plate tastes of truffle without the cost of studding it with them. Truffles reached American luxury kitchens preserved in tins from Périgord and Piedmont as well as fresh in season, and their presence on a menu was in itself a statement about what the house could afford. The technique of extracting into Madeira is characteristic of the period: fortified wine both carried aromatics that water could not and gave a small measure of preservation to a liquid that would otherwise spoil within a day or two in a nineteenth-century larder.