No. 644

Bourgeoise Garnishing

Garniture a la Bourgeoise

Have two pounds of cabbage, parboiled and cooked with half a pound of salt pork, blanched for fifteen minutes, moisten with a quart of strained broth (No. 194a), and its fat. Twenty pieces of small cork shaped turnips, blanched and cooked in broth, reduced to a glaze just when cooked. Twenty small pear-shaped carrots, blanched, cooked in broth, and reduced to a glaze just as they are finished. Twenty small, blanched, braised and glazed onions. Dress the cabbage on both ends of the meat, garnishing the former with the salt pork cut in slices, and group the carrots, turnips, and onions around in alternate clusters. Serve separately a gravy (No. 404) thickened with ospagnole sauce (No. 414), and well reduced.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a garnish, not a standalone dish: a set of vegetables meant to be dressed around a braised or boiled joint of beef. Ranhofer writes it as a component of a larger service, and it depends on stocks and sauces given elsewhere in the book.

The cross-referencesNo. 194a is the broth called for, No. 404 the gravy, and No. 414 espagnole, the brown mother sauce built on brown roux and brown stock. Without those you can substitute a good unsalted beef stock and a reduced brown pan sauce, but the recipe assumes a kitchen with all three already standing.
Cork-shaped and pear-shapedBoth mean turned vegetables, cut to a named shape: "cork shaped" a short straight-sided cylinder, "pear-shaped" swelling at one end and narrowing at the other. Uniformity is the whole point, since they cook to the same doneness and glaze evenly.
Glazing is the hingeEach vegetable is cooked separately in broth and the liquid reduced at the last moment to a syrupy film that coats it. If the pan is reduced too early the vegetables scorch; too late and they collapse. Cook them in wide shallow pans, one type at a time, and stop the moment they take on gloss.
Blanching the salt porkFifteen minutes in boiling water pulls out enough salt that the pork can then simmer with the cabbage without oversalting it. Modern salt pork is variable; taste the blanching water and repeat if it is still aggressive.
Cabbage quantityTwo pounds will cook down considerably. The quart of broth plus the pork fat is a braising liquid, not a boiling bath, so use a covered pan and expect the cabbage to be soft and glossy rather than swimming.
Turnips need less time than carrotsTwenty of each sounds symmetrical, but small turnips generally glaze faster than carrots. The recipe treats each vegetable separately in any case.
YieldThe recipe gives no yield, and the size of the joint is unspecified. Scale the vegetable count to the number at table, not to the weight of meat.

A Little History

À la bourgeoise is one of the older classical garnish names, and it means plain or household-style: root vegetables turned and glazed, braised onions, cabbage with salt pork, served around a braised piece of beef rather than tricked out with truffles or quenelles. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as an encyclopedic record of that kitchen's practice, and its garnish section is essentially a catalogue of standard combinations a cook was expected to assemble on order — each one numbered, each one leaning on the stocks and sauces indexed elsewhere in the volume. The irony of the name is worth noting: by the time a dish this labor-intensive reached a Delmonico's plate, with every carrot and turnip individually turned and glazed, nothing about it was bourgeois except the vegetables it started from.