No. 860

Cassolettes Lusigny

Cassolettes a la Lusigny

Fill some timbale molds (No. 2, Fig. 137) with butter melted to the consistency of cream, leave to cool, then dip them into very hot water and unmold, roll them in cracker dust, dip in beaten eggs, then in bread-crumbs, and again in beaten eggs and bread-crumbs; smooth neatly with a knife and slit around the top with a pastry cutter dipped in hot water, this should be a quarter of an inch in diameter smaller than the timbale itself; fry a few at the time in very hot frying fat, and when of a fine color, remove the covers, stand them on a grate, at the oven door and let all the butter drain out. Cut up some unsmoked, salted tongue, mushrooms, truffles, and chicken, into small quarter inch squares, combine this salpicon with buttered allemande sauce (No. 407), fill the cassolettes, and place on top a round of truffle the size of the opening to take the place of a cover; it should be a quarter of an inch in thickness.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a piece of nineteenth-century kitchen engineering rather than a recipe in the usual sense: the butter is not an ingredient but a disposable mold, chilled solid so it can be breaded, fried, then melted out to leave a hollow crumb shell. Everything depends on keeping the butter cold and the fat hot.

How the trick worksSolid butter cast in a small timbale mold is breaded and dropped into hot fat. The crust sets in seconds while the butter inside liquefies and drains away through the cut lid, leaving a crisp edible cup. If the butter softens before it hits the fat, the case collapses; chill the breaded shapes hard, ideally in the freezer, and fry three or four at a time so the fat temperature does not fall.
Timbale moldsRanhofer's No. 2 timbale mold is a small straight-sided or slightly tapered metal cup; the book gives only an illustration, so treat any size as approximate. Metal dariole molds or small stainless timbales are the modern equivalent. The "slit around the top with a pastry cutter" scores a lid, the cutter being a quarter of an inch smaller in diameter than the timbale itself, so the cover lifts off cleanly after frying.
Cracker dustFinely rolled dry soda or water crackers, sieved. It may grip the greasy butter better than soft breadcrumbs, though the recipe gives no reason for the order. Panko is too coarse for the first coat; use fine dry crumbs or crushed unsalted crackers.
Double breading is not optionalEgg, crumb, egg, crumb builds a shell thick enough to survive when its structural filling melts. Smooth every seam with a knife blade, as directed. Any gap leaks butter into the fat and the case deflates.
Very hot frying fatThe book gives no temperature; "very hot" implies the high end of frying range, but any figure is a modern guess. Cooler fat gives the butter time to escape before the crust sets. The instruction to stand the drained cases on a grate at the oven door means a warm spot to finish draining, not to bake.
Unsmoked salted tongueCured but unsmoked beef tongue, simmered until tender, skinned, and cooled before dicing. Pickled tongue from a deli is the closest substitute; smoked tongue will dominate the salpicon. A salpicon is simply a mixture of ingredients cut to uniform small dice, here a quarter inch.
Allemande sauceRanhofer's No. 407 is an allemande built on a velouté thickened with an egg-yolk and cream liaison; consult the original for its exact finish. It must not boil once the yolks go in. A thick, well-reduced velouté enriched with yolk and cream will serve; the sauce should coat the diced filling heavily enough that it does not run out of the case.
Truffle lidsA round of truffle the size of the opening and a quarter of an inch thick stands in for a cover, a garnish from a time when truffles were far cheaper than they are now. A slice of cooked mushroom cap, or a round of truffle from a jar, does the same visual job at a fraction of the cost.
Yield and serviceFigure one or two cassolettes per person as a hot side dish or a first course. Fill them at the last moment: the crumb shell goes soft within minutes of meeting the sauce, and there is no reviving it.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894, during a career of some three decades at Delmonico's in New York, and this recipe shows exactly what a large brigade kitchen could afford to do that a household could not. The butter-mold case is a purely professional flourish, a hollow fried shell built around a substance meant to disappear, and it belongs to the same tradition of edible containers as the croustade, the vol-au-vent and the bouchée. "Cassolette" is a diminutive in the same family as casserole -- both trace back to casse, a pan -- and means a small individual dish rather than the baked casserole of later American usage. The Lusigny name follows the book's habit of attaching aristocratic or place-name garnishes to particular combinations of salpicon and sauce; such names circulated among French chefs of the period as shorthand for a fixed formula, and their origins are usually traditional rather than documented. What identifies this one is the pairing of tongue, mushroom, truffle and chicken bound in allemande, a combination that turns up across the era's garde-manger repertoire wherever cold cooked meats needed elegant reuse.