No. 716

Puree of Game

Puree de Gibier

Remove one pound of cooked meat from either partridge, snipe, hare, grouse or wild duck, suppress all the skin and nerves, and pound the rest with a piece of butter, then rub it through a sieve. Put this pulp into a saucepan, season it with salt, red pepper, and nutmeg, and mix in half a pint of reduced and very thick veloute (No. 415), if for white game, or a brown sauce (No. 414) for brown game; heat it without ceasing to stir and without letting it boil, and just when ready to serve, add two ounces of fine butter. Should a very thick puree be required, then pound the meats with a quarter of its quantity of boiled and very consistent rice, or else with some cooked game forcemeat (No. 62).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classical game purée used as a garnish, filling or bed rather than a dish on its own. It is essentially potted game loosened with a finished sauce, and it lives or dies by temperature control.

Never let it boilThe purée is bound with butter and a flour-thickened sauce, and it holds only below a simmer. Bring it just to steaming over low heat, stirring constantly; a boil makes the meat fibres seize and grain, and the butter breaks out as oil.
"Suppress" means removeRanhofer's translated French uses suppress for discard. Strip skin, sinew, tendon and any shot-damaged tissue before pounding, or the sieve will simply refuse the mixture.
Half a pintOne cup of reduced velouté or brown sauce to one pound of meat. It should be thick enough to mound on a spoon before it goes in; a thin sauce gives a loose, greyish purée.
Red pepperCayenne, used sparingly; that is the ordinary sense of the term in American cookbooks of the period. Paprika and fresh peppers appear elsewhere in the book under their own names.
Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but still pass the result through a fine sieve or tamis — that step, not the pounding, is what makes the texture. Work it through with a stiff rubber spatula or the back of a ladle.
White game and brown gameThe distinction is the colour of the flesh rather than the species: pale-fleshed game such as partridge or pheasant breast suits the velouté, while dark-fleshed game such as hare, wild duck and snipe suits the brown sauce. The recipe does not say which of its birds it counts as which. If you are not making the book's mother sauces, a well-reduced chicken velouté or a proper demi-glace stands in.
Sourcing the gameWild snipe and grouse are not general retail items in most countries and hunting seasons govern them. Farmed pheasant, guinea fowl, quail, duck legs or rabbit all behave the same way here; the meat must be fully cooked first, and braised legs and thighs purée better than dry roast breast.
YieldA pound of meat with a cup of sauce and the butter makes a generous quantity, comfortably more than a pint of purée — enough to fill a good number of small tartlets or croustades, or to garnish several plates. Add the two ounces of butter at the very end, just before serving, as the recipe directs.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its "Garnishings" chapter is a catalogue of components rather than dishes — purées, forcemeats, stuffings and butters to be drawn on as needed. Purées of this kind belong to the pre-blender era, when a marble mortar and a hair sieve were the only route to a smooth meat paste. Game was still abundant on American restaurant menus in the 1880s and 90s: snipe, grouse and canvasback duck appeared in numbers that later game laws would make impossible, and the recipe calls for a pound of cooked meat. The instruction to stiffen it with boiled rice or a cooked forcemeat points to its practical uses — piped into croustades, spread under a roast, or bound firm enough to hold a shape on the plate.