No. 886

Grouse Croquettes with Tomatoed Soubise Sauce

Croquettes de Tetras Sauce Soubise Tomatee

Cut the meat from roasted grouse into three-sixteenth inch squares removing all the skin, bones and nerves; cut the same quantity of cooked mushrooms the same size; mingle the two with some well reduced Madeira sauce (No. 492), season with salt, pepper and nutmeg, let boil up once, then pour it into a vessel to incorporate in a little fresh butter; let this preparation get cool. Divide it into equal parts and shape each one into a cylindrical croquette, two inches long by one inch in diamater, dip in beaten eggs, roll in bread-crumbs and fry to a fine golden brown, drain, wipe and dress on folded napkins; serve separately a soubise sauce (No. 543), with tomato sauce (No. 549) added.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A cross-reference recipe of the kind that fills The Epicurean: the croquette itself is four lines, and the work sits in the three numbered sauces it points you to. Everything here depends on the binding sauce being reduced far enough and the mixture being properly cold.

The hinge: reduce and chillThe mixture is bound by nothing but well-reduced Madeira sauce and butter, so it must be thick enough to hold a shape when cold. Spread it on a tray, press film to the surface and refrigerate at least four hours or overnight; a mixture shaped while merely cool will burst in the fat.
Madeira sauce (No. 492)Ranhofer's is espagnole finished with Madeira and reduced hard. A modern equivalent is a good demi-glace reduced with dry Madeira until it coats a spoon heavily. If yours is thin, tighten it further rather than adding flour.
Soubise with tomato (Nos. 543, 549)Soubise is an onion sauce: onions blanched and stewed soft in butter, puréed, and bound with béchamel or reduced rice. The tomato sauce is stirred in at the end to taste, which turns it pink and cuts the sweetness of the onion.
GrouseWild grouse is dark, dry and strongly flavoured, and in the US it is generally not sold commercially. Roast pheasant, squab, duck breast or dark-meat guinea fowl behave similarly in a croquette; use meat already roasted and rested, as the recipe assumes leftovers.
"Nerves"Nineteenth-century butchery language for sinew, tendon and silverskin. Pick it out carefully, since anything chewy is very obvious in a three-sixteenth-inch dice.
The diceThree-sixteenths of an inch is about 5 mm, cut by hand with a knife. This is a salpicon, not a forcemeat; do not be tempted into a food processor, which turns the whole thing to paste.
Mushrooms"Cooked mushrooms" means mushrooms already cooked, most likely stewed in butter with lemon in the usual manner of the book, not raw. Cook them dry enough that they release no more liquid into the mixture, or the croquettes will slacken.
FryingDeep fat at 350-375F, in small batches, until golden, about two to three minutes. A cold, well-crumbed croquette in fat that is too cool will absorb oil and split.
Yield and serviceRoughly a cup of bound salpicon gives eight to ten croquettes of the size specified, enough for four as a hot entree. The folded napkin is period presentation; a rack over paper does the draining better, and the sauce goes in a boat alongside, never poured over the crust.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working system set down in print, which is why so many entries are three sentences of assembly hanging off numbered sauces elsewhere in the book. Croquettes were a staple of that system: they used up the roast game and poultry from the previous service, and they let a kitchen turn a handful of scraps into a composed hot side dish with a name in French. The sauce here is a piece of classical grammar rather than invention: sauce soubise, an onion purée associated with the eighteenth-century Prince de Soubise and his household, and adding tomato to it appears to have been one accepted way of lightening and colouring a white sauce. Grouse in an American menu of this period generally meant birds shot in the field and sent to market, an arrangement that game laws of the following decades largely ended.