No. 731

Puree of Truffles and Puree of Truffles with Rice

Puree de truffes et Puree de Truffes au Riz

Peel a few good, raw truffles, half a pound in all; put the peelings into a saucepan with some Madeira wine, cook them for a few minutes to extract the essence, then strain. Grate the truffles and set them in a saucepan with a pint of bechamel (No. 409), and let them cook for five minutes, adding four ounces of poached quenelle forcemeat (No. 89). Pound and rub the whole through a sieve; reduce the truffle essence with half a pint of half-glaze sauce (No. 413), incorporating into it slowly a few spoonfuls of melted glaze (No. 402), and when sufficiently succulent and thick, pour it into the puree, heat this without allowing it to boil, remove it from the fire when ready to serve and stir in two ounces of fine butter.

Puree of Truffles with Rice.—Mince half a pound of cooked truffles, and then pound them with a quarter of a pound of rice boiled in white broth until very dry; season with salt, cayenne, and nutmeg, and pound this in a mortar adding one gill of veloute (No. 415), and a little cream. Press through a tammy (No. 170), heat, and finish with two ounces of fine butter.

← No. 730 Puree of Tomatoes Garnishings No. 732 Puree of Turnips →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two thick truffle purées meant as garnish or filling rather than a dish in their own right, and both depend on Ranhofer's cross-referenced base sauces. Read the numbered references as a shopping list of things to make first.

The hinge: never let it boilOnce the reduced essence goes into the purée, the mixture is held below a simmer and the butter is stirred in off the heat. Boiling splits the béchamel-and-butter emulsion and dulls the truffle aroma, which is volatile and largely lost above a bare simmer.
A gill is half a cupThe second purée calls for one gill of velouté, that is 4 fl oz. A pint in Ranhofer's American edition is 16 fl oz.
The cross-referencesNo. 409 is béchamel, No. 413 half-glaze (demi-glace), No. 402 melted meat glaze, No. 415 velouté, No. 89 quenelle forcemeat, No. 170 the tammy. Any decent modern demi-glace and velouté will stand in; the glaze is simply stock reduced to a syrup.
Quenelle forcemeatFour ounces of poached forcemeat is there chiefly as a binder. Ranhofer's quenelle forcemeats are pounded meat-and-panada mixtures; see No. 89 for the one he intends here. It is poached before being pounded with the truffles, which helps the puree hold its shape when spooned.
Tammy and mortarA tammy is a fine worsted straining cloth wrung between two people. A food processor followed by a fine drum sieve or a doubled piece of muslin does the same work; the point is a purée with no fibre in it.
Half a pound of trufflesThis is a restaurant quantity from an era when truffles were expensive rather than unobtainable. Scaled down, keep the peelings-in-Madeira step: the skin carries a good deal of aroma and this is how it is recovered rather than thrown away.
White brothAn unbrowned veal or poultry stock, lightly seasoned. Cook the rice in it until genuinely dry, as the recipe directs, since any surplus liquid will loosen the puree past the point where butter can bring it back.
Yield and useServe warm, immediately, in tartlets, under game, or as a bed for poached eggs or sweetbreads.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's account of his long career as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its structure explains a recipe like this: the garnishings chapter is a catalogue of components, each written on the assumption that the reader already has bechamel, veloute, demi-glace and glaze standing in the kitchen. Purees of this kind belong to the classical French system in which Ranhofer, who trained in Paris before coming to America, was schooled: a vegetable or truffle is pounded, bound with a mother sauce and a little poached forcemeat, passed through cloth, and finished with butter off the heat. The insistence on saving the peelings suits both thrift and technique, truffle skin carrying a good deal of the aroma, and steeping peelings in Madeira to draw an essence appears in French professional cookery of the period. That truffles appear here as a puree at all, by the half pound, is a fair measure of what a Delmonico's larder looked like.