No. 847
Bressoles of Game
Bressoles de Gibier
This is one of Ranhofer's shorthand entries: almost everything it needs sits in three other numbered recipes. Read it alongside No. 91 (game quenelle forcemeat), No. 492 (brown Madeira sauce) and No. 848 (bressoles of fat livers), which supplies the shaping, cooking and service the text here declines to repeat.
- What a bressole isA thin layer of quenelle forcemeat enclosing a garnish and closed over itself: a forcemeat envelope rather than a pastry one. Ranhofer gives no shaping instructions here, deferring them to No. 848. It is not a rissole, and there is no dough anywhere in it.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: gentle cooking -- Quenelle forcemeat is an emulsion of pounded raw meat, egg and cream; hard boiling can drive the cream out and leave the forcemeat granular and weeping. Ranhofer gives no cooking method or temperature here — that comes from No. 848 — so none can be quoted from this text.
- "Not too solid"Ranhofer means the forcemeat should be slack enough to spread thinly and seal against itself, but firm enough to hold a shape. Test by poaching a teaspoonful in simmering water before committing the batch; adjust with more cream or more panada accordingly.
- SalpiconA salpicon is simply a dice — here foie gras, truffle and mushroom cut small and even, about a quarter inch, bound with just enough sauce to hold together. Chill the mixture firm before filling or it will run out of the forcemeat as you seal it.
- Foie grasThe recipe does not say whether the foie gras is raw or cooked; both were to be had. A block of cooked foie gras terrine works and needs only to be diced cold; add it late and warm it through rather than cooking it hard, or the fat renders out into the sauce.
- Game and trufflesAny dark game flesh will make the forcemeat — venison, hare, pheasant, partridge, wild duck — and the choice should match whatever the rest of the menu is doing. The recipe says only 'truffles'; fresh or preserved will serve, and if preserved, the juice belongs in the Madeira sauce.
- The Madeira sauceNo. 492 is a reduced brown sauce built on stock and Madeira, not a pan sauce. Reduce it well past pourable so the salpicon binds rather than sloshes, and keep a thinner batch for the plate.
- Yield and serviceThe book files these under hot side dishes in a long menu. No yield is given. Serve hot as soon as they are cooked, napped with the reserved Madeira sauce; they are not a preparation that holds well.
Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole of that repertoire — some twelve hundred pages of French haute cuisine as it was actually cooked for American money. The bressole belongs to the family of forcemeat preparations that dominate its hot side dishes: quenelles, boudins, mousselines, godiveaux, all resting on the same laborious pounded farce that a nineteenth-century brigade could produce because it had the hands to do it. The name is generally traced to the same root as brissole and rissole, describing something small, filled and browned, though by Ranhofer's day the bressole had settled into its own shape as a forcemeat case rather than a pastry one. The reliance on cross-references is characteristic of the book and tells you who it was written for: not a home cook, but a professional who already had forcemeat and Madeira sauce standing in the larder and needed only to be told what to do with them today.