No. 861

Cassolettes, Montholon

Cassolettes a la Montholon

Procure timbale molds (No. 3, Fig. 137), fill these with butter melted to a cream, and let get very cold; unmold by dipping them into hot water, and stand them away on the ice until hard, then dip them into powdered crackers, and in beaten eggs, also in bread-crumbs, again in the eggs, then roll them in bread-crumbs once more, smooth the surfaces with the blade of a knife, and form an incision on the top with a round pastry cutter three-quarters of an inch in diameter; plunge them into very hot frying fat, lift off the cover, and turn them over on to a grate placed over a tin pan, and set them at the oven door; when the butter has entirely melted, fill the insides with a salpicon of truffles, beef palates, and sweetbreads, mixed with supreme sauce (No. 547), lay on top a cover made of a fluted and glazed mushroom, and serve hot.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a piece of nineteenth-century culinary engineering: the butter is not an ingredient of the finished dish but a disposable core that shapes a breaded shell and then melts away, leaving a hollow crisp case for the filling. Everything depends on the butter staying rock hard until it hits the fat.

The hinge: keep the butter frozenCast the butter cores, then hold them in the freezer, not merely the refrigerator, and bread them in short batches straight from the cold. A core that begins to soften will collapse in the crumbs or blow out in the fryer.
Timbale molds, No. 3Ranhofer's numbers refer to the molds shown in his own illustrations (here Fig. 137); No. 3 is one of the smaller timbale shapes. Any small dariole or similar metal mold gives the same result.
"Powdered crackers" and the double breadingFinely crushed plain soda or water crackers, ground to a powder. The alternating cracker–egg–crumb–egg–crumb sequence is what makes the shell strong enough to stand up once its butter core is gone; do not shorten it to a single coat.
Frying fat temperature'Very hot' means fat at the top of the frying range, in the region of 375F. Too cool and the butter melts before the crust sets; too hot and the crumbs colour before the shell is rigid.
"Set them at the oven door"A warm, low-heat station in a coal range; use any gently warm spot, such as the top of the stove near a burner. The cases sit inverted on the grate over a pan with the cut cover removed, so the butter runs out of the opening; the point is to drain them, not to cook them further.
Beef palatesThe ox palate, once a standard garnish meat, is now hard to find outside specialty butchers and offal suppliers. Omit it, or replace with an equal quantity of blanched veal sweetbread or braised mushroom for texture.
SweetbreadsSoak in several changes of cold water, blanch, peel the membrane and press under a weight before dicing for the salpicon. Untreated sweetbread turns spongy and grey in the sauce.
Supreme sauceRanhofer's No. 547 is a chicken velouté finished with cream and butter, reduced until it coats. Keep it thick — a loose sauce softens the fried shell within a minute.
The mushroom lid"Fluted" means the cap carved with shallow curved grooves; the recipe then calls for it glazed. A neatly turned, glazed cap is the whole decoration.
Yield and serviceThe original gives none. Figure two cassolettes per person as a hot side dish, and fry, drain, fill and serve in one continuous movement; they will not wait.

A Little History

Cassolette is simply a small casserole — a little vessel — and in the grand nineteenth-century kitchen the word came to mean the edible container as much as the dish it sat in: shells of forcemeat, pastry, potato, or as here, breadcrumb built around a butter core. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York and author of The Epicurean (1894), lists a series of cassolettes, each with a different name and filling, which is how the classical repertoire was organised: one technique, endlessly re-labelled. The name Montholon is generally taken from the French family of that name, best known through the Comte de Montholon who accompanied Napoleon to Saint Helena, but as with most of these garnish titles the connection is honorific rather than documented, and Ranhofer offers no explanation. What the recipe does document is the labour available to a restaurant of that era: a salpicon of truffles, beef palates and sweetbreads bound in supreme sauce, served inside a fried shell that exists for perhaps five minutes before it goes soft, and capped with a mushroom carved by hand.