No. 639

Andalouse Garnishing

Garniture a l'Andalouse

Made with eight braised lettuce, eight small Chorisos (smoked sausages) cooked with the cabbage, two pounds of cabbage, half a pound of chick peas; one pound of braised ham; one pint of espagnole sauce (No. 414) reduced with two gills of tomatoes (No. 730). Dress the lettuce, the cabbage and the chick peas in clusters, range the sausages on one end and the ham on the other.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is not a standalone dish but a composed garnish — a platter arrangement meant to surround a large roast or braised joint, with each element cooked separately and then grouped. Ranhofer assumes you already have espagnole and tomato sauce on hand, which is the main obstacle to making it now.

Two gills of tomatoesA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup. No. 730 is Ranhofer's own tomato preparation, not raw chopped tomato; a good thick passata reduced slightly is the nearest equivalent.
Espagnole sauceHis No. 414 is the classical brown sauce, a brown roux moistened with stock and long simmered. A well-reduced dark veal or beef stock thickened lightly will stand in, and the pint reduces with the tomato to a sauce that coats rather than pools.
ChorisosSpanish chorizo, the cured smoked kind, not the fresh raw Mexican sausage of the same name; the recipe glosses them as smoked. Eight small ones means eight links, cooked with the cabbage so their paprika fat colours it.
Chick peasHalf a pound, most likely dried weight. Soak overnight and simmer until tender before they join the arrangement — canned chickpeas, drained and warmed through in a little of the cabbage liquid, work and save several hours.
Braised lettuceFirm romaine or cos hearts, blanched, squeezed dry, folded into neat parcels and braised in stock until silky. Loose modern butterhead collapses to nothing; buy something with a spine.
Braised hamA pound of cooked ham braised in stock or Madeira until it takes on the sauce, then sliced. Any good unsmoked cooked ham does the job.
The arrangement is the pointEach component goes down in a distinct cluster around the meat — lettuce, cabbage and chickpeas in separate mounds, sausages banked at one end, ham at the other. Do not toss them together; the visual separation is what the recipe is for.
YieldAs written this is a garnish for a large platter rather than a dish in itself. Halve everything for a domestic roast.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summing-up of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its long chapter of garnishings is essentially a catalogue of ways to dress a platter, each named for a place, a person or a court. À l'andalouse signals Andalusia, and in classical French kitchen naming a Spanish-referenced garnish was often associated with ingredients a French chef connected to the south of Spain. Here the marker is the chorizo and the chickpeas, the latter a staple of the Andalusian cocido and puchero, folded into a thoroughly French structure of braised lettuce, espagnole and neat clustered mounds. A diner reading "andalouse" on a menu would know roughly what would arrive.