No. 398

Chicken or Game Glaze

Glace de Volaille ou de Gibier

To the chicken stock, set apart to prepare a glaze, some good veal stock (No. 423) may be added, operating the same for a game stock, to which put in parts of both veal and chicken; the process is always the same; it is especially during the shooting season that excellent game glaze can be prepared with all the smaller parts and bones of large game. Prepare an ordinary broth, obtaining it as clear as possible, strain, skim off the fat and let it deposit its sediment. Collect all the good meat from the large game, such as thighs, shoulders or breasts of hare or deer, also from old partridges, and the pinions and giblets from the pheasants or partridges. Make a mirepoix of roots, and minced onions, put with it all the above meats, also a piece of the shoulder, breast of veal; their white fragments, or those of chickens, and fry them for a few minutes; moisten them moderately with some broth (No. 187), and let this fall to a glaze, then moisten again abundantly with the prepared game broth, adding a few boned and parboiled calves' feet; as soon as the meat is done, drain well; strain and skim the liquid; let it settle so as to be able to pour off the clear top and reduce this once more.

← No. 397 Fumet of Partridge or Other Game Stocks, Essences & Auxiliaries No. 399 Fish Glaze →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a method for reducing poultry or game stock to a syrupy glaze, written for a brigade with several stockpots already going. The whole thing hinges on clarity: every skimming and settling step exists so the finished glaze sets clear rather than cloudy and bitter.

What a glaze isA glace is stock reduced until it coats a spoon and sets firm and rubbery when cold — roughly a tenth of its starting volume, sometimes less. A gallon of good stock yields perhaps a cup and a half.
Mirepoix of rootsHere this means root vegetables cut coarsely and browned in fat — carrot, with something like parsnip or turnip — the recipe pairing them with minced onions. No quantities are given.
"Let this fall to a glaze"The first moistening is deliberately scant so the liquid cooks away and the meat and vegetables catch and brown on the pan bottom. That fond is where the colour and depth come from. Only then do you add the bulk of the liquid.
Calves' feetThese supply gelatin so the reduction sets. A butcher can usually order them; otherwise substitute split pig's trotters or 2-3 lb of veal knuckle. Without a gelatinous cut the glaze will thicken but never set to the firm block the recipe assumes.
Pinions and gibletsWing tips, and the neck, heart and gizzard. Livers are usually kept out of stock, as they can muddy and embitter it, so reserve them for other uses.
Skim, settle, decantThe instruction to let the liquid deposit its sediment and pour off the clear top is repeated twice for good reason. Fat and fine particles scorch as the volume drops, and a glaze reduced with them in it goes acrid. Chilling the strained stock overnight makes both fat and sediment trivial to remove.
Reduce in stagesReduce in a wide pan, and transfer to a smaller one as the volume falls. Toward the end the liquid catches quickly; drop the heat and stir. Do not salt at any point — seasoning concentrates tenfold.
KeepingSet glaze holds two to three weeks refrigerated, or for months frozen in ice-cube trays. A single cube dissolved in a pan sauce does the work this whole procedure was built for.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was written by Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and its opening chapters on stocks, essences, and glazes are the load-bearing part of the book — hundreds of later recipes simply cross-reference a number here. That system of numbered building blocks comes out of the French kitchen of Carême and his successors, where glace de viande and its poultry and game variants gave a cook instant body and gloss for a sauce without starting from scratch. The reference to the shooting season is not decorative: American restaurant kitchens of the 1890s bought wild game freely at market, and the trimmings of hare, deer, pheasant, and partridge that a modern cook would never see in quantity were exactly the scraps that made the best glaze. Market hunting on that scale was curtailed by the Lacey Act of 1900 and later migratory bird protections, which is why a game glaze today is generally built from farmed birds or venison rather than a season's worth of wild carcasses.