No. 845
Bondons of Woodcock a la Diane
Bondons de Becasses a la Diane
Ranhofer writes in shorthand for a professional brigade: three cross-references stand in for most of the method. Here is what the numbers hide, and what the technique actually requires.
- The hinge: it is a mousseline, cooked gentlyNo. 75 is a cream forcemeat, pounded raw flesh worked with egg white and heavy cream, sieved, and kept cold at every stage. Ranhofer specifies no temperature; the modern practice is to poach the filled molds in a bain-marie at a bare tremble, well below a boil, until just set. A rolling boil curdles the cream and the bondons weep and turn grainy.
- What a bondon isThe word is French for a bung or stopper, and is also the name of a small cylindrical Normandy cheese; either way it describes the shape. The molds are dariole or timbale cylinders; Ranhofer says only that they match those for No. 844, so no capacity can be derived from this page. Butter them cold and thoroughly; nothing else will release a mousseline cleanly.
- Sourcing woodcockAmerican woodcock cannot legally be sold in the United States; it reaches a kitchen only through a licensed hunter in season. Cooks without that access generally substitute quail, squab or duck breast, all of which behave the same way in a forcemeat, though none carry woodcock's iron-heavy flavor.
- Trail and liverNineteenth-century game cookery treated the woodcock's intestines as the prize and worked them into the farce or the sauce. If you are working from a whole bird, that is where the character of the dish lives; if you substitute poultry, a little chicken liver pounded into the forcemeat is a common modern substitution.
- Sherry sauceNo. 492 is Ranhofer's sherry sauce; sauces of this family are generally built on a brown base finished with sherry, though the composition is not given on this page. A dry sherry suits the dish better than a sweet one, and adding it late preserves the aroma.
- The diceThree-sixteenths of an inch is just under 5 mm, a small dice rather larger than a classical brunoise. Cut the ham and truffle by hand and warm them in the sauce rather than simmering them, or the truffle gives up its perfume to the pot.
- Yield and serviceThe page heading places this among the hot side dishes: figure one bondon per person. Ranhofer gives no quantity of forcemeat, so no yield can be read off the recipe. Unmold onto a warm dish, dress in a ring or a line, and pass the sauce separately as Ranhofer directs; flooding the plate softens the set surface.
The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is organized like a professional's reference rather than a household book, hence the numbered cross-references that make a recipe like this unusable on its own. The suffix a la Diane, after the Roman goddess of the hunt, is standard French kitchen code for a game preparation, most familiar today in sauce Diane; here it signals woodcock, a prized American game bird in the Gilded Age and a fixture of autumn menus at the great restaurants. Woodcock arrived at Delmonico's by market hunters, a trade that the Lacey Act of 1900 and later migratory-bird law brought to an end, which is why a dish that was once merely expensive is now essentially unbuyable. The forcemeat itself belongs to the classical mousseline family, a technique that presented the birds in a shape more elegant than any roast carcass would allow.