No. 638

A la Reine Garnishing

Garniture a la Reine

Is composed of the white meat cut from a cooked chicken, truffles and mushrooms, all being cut into three-sixteenths of an inch squares. This garnishing is used with bouchess of the same name, or else inside small patties a la Reine; in this case mingle the ingredients with a veloute sauce (No. 415) thickened with egg-yolks and leave it to get cool before filling the patties.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a component rather than a dish: a fine dice of white chicken meat, truffle and mushroom, bound with velouté when it is used as a filling. The proportions are left to the cook, which is normal for Ranhofer's garnish chapter.

The hinge: bind cold, fill coldThe hinge: bind cool, fill cool -- the recipe is explicit that the velouté thickened with egg yolks should be left to get cool before the patties are filled. Filling warm cases risks a soggy pastry.
The dice size is the pointThree-sixteenths of an inch is about 5 mm, a small even dice (a salpicon rather than the finer brunoise). Cut everything to the same size or the garnish reads as scraps rather than as a la Reine. Chilling the cooked breast firm makes it easier to cut.
Velouté No. 415A white sauce built on a white roux and a light stock, in the usual nineteenth-century sense of the term. Any well-reduced chicken velouté works; it needs to be thick enough to hold the dice in suspension, closer to a thick sauce than a pouring one.
Egg-yolk liaisonTemper the yolks with a little hot sauce, return them off the heat, and hold below a simmer. Boiling after the yolks go in will curdle the sauce and no amount of whisking recovers it.
TrufflesTruffle was a luxury item but obtainable in Ranhofer's New York, often as imported preserved truffle; today a small tin of truffle peelings or a few grams of preserved truffle gives the colour contrast the garnish is built on. Truffle oil does not, since the point is the black flecks.
MushroomsMost likely the cultivated white mushroom, though the entry does not say. Cook and cool them before dicing, and drain well, or their liquid will thin the sauce in the pastry.
Bouchees and pattiesBoth are puff-pastry cases, the bouchee small enough for one bite and the patty a two- or three-bite shell. Bake and cool the cases, then fill shortly before serving.
YieldThe entry gives no quantities. As a working guess only: the breast meat of one chicken with a smaller quantity of mushrooms and a little truffle, bound with enough velouté to hold it, will fill a couple of dozen small bouchees.

A Little History

Anything called a la Reine in nineteenth-century French kitchens meant white meat of chicken in a pale creamy sauce, and the name is traditionally traced to a queen of the French court, though which one varies with the telling; the same convention gives us potage a la reine, a white chicken soup. Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of his decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its garnish chapter is essentially a catalogue: numbered, cross-referenced, and meant to be assembled by a brigade working from other numbered pages rather than read straight through. That is why this entry gives no quantities at all. A garniture in that system is a fixed idea, not a measured formula, and the cook was expected to know the standing velouté and scale the dice to whatever was being served that evening.