No. 892

Woodcock Croquettes with Truffles

Croquettes de Becasses aux Truffes

Suppress the skin and nerves from one pound of woodcock fillets; cut them into three-sixteenth inch dice, and add a quarter of a pound of truffles; reduce one quart of espagnole (No. 414) and veloute (No. 415) combined, and when well reduced thicken it with four raw egg-yolks, and two ounces of fresh butter; add to it the game meats and truffles, and return it to the fire, stir incessantly until the first boil, then take it off and set it away to cool. Divide this preparation into one and three-quarter inch sized balls; roll them on a table dredged with bread-crumbs to give them the shape of a pear, and dip these into beaten eggs, and afterward roll them in bread-crumbs; smooth the surfaces with the blade of a knife, and plunge them into hot fat; when done drain on folded napkins, imitate the stalks with bits of parsley, range them crown shaped garnishing the center with fried parsley. The game may be replaced by a salpicon of foies-gras.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's croquette in the strict French manner: a very stiff, sauce-bound salpicon, chilled hard, shaped, breaded and fried. Most of the work is in the sauce, and most of the failures come from not reducing it far enough.

The hinge is the reductionOne quart of combined espagnole and velouté must come down to a heavy, almost paste-like mass before the yolks go in; Ranhofer gives no target volume, only "well reduced." A sauce that still flows will not hold a pear shape and will burst in the fryer no matter how well breaded.
"First boil," then off the heatWith four yolks in the pan, that first bubble is the signal, not a target to hold. Stir constantly and take the pan off the fire as the mixture moves; held at the boil the yolks can tighten and grain, though the flour in the espagnole and velouté gives some protection.
Chill properlyRanhofer says only "set it away to cool." Spread it in a shallow pan, film the surface to stop a skin forming, and refrigerate at least four hours or overnight. Warm forcemeat cannot be shaped or breaded cleanly.
Sourcing woodcockWoodcock is a migratory game bird and cannot legally be sold in the United States; it reaches a kitchen only through a licensed hunter in season. A pound of skinned fillets is a great many woodcock — the birds weigh roughly five to eight ounces whole.
Substitutions the book itself offersThe closing line — a salpicon of foie gras in place of the game — is the practical route today. Squab, duck breast or dark-meat pheasant all work in the same sauce, and the recipe immediately preceding this one in the book is the pheasant version.
TrufflesA quarter pound of black truffle is a period luxury that now costs more than the rest of the dish combined. Preserved truffle peelings, or a smaller quantity of fresh truffle finely diced, keep the intent without the outlay; truffle oil does not, since the point here is texture in the dice as much as aroma.
Frying"Hot fat" for breaded croquettes means 350–375°F. Below that they soak; above, the crumb colours before the centre is hot. Two to three minutes gets a pear of this size through.
Fried parsleyDry sprigs, a few seconds in the same fat, drained hard. Wet parsley spits violently in deep fat — shake and blot it first.
YieldThe original gives none. About 16 to 18 croquettes at the specified inch-and-three-quarter size, which as a hot side dish serves eight.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the restaurant's working repertoire set down in numbered order — hence the cross-references to espagnole and velouté by number rather than recipe. Woodcock sat near the top of the nineteenth-century American game hierarchy, prized for dark, faintly liverish flesh and traditionally cooked with the trail left in; that a chef would mince a pound of its fillets into croquette meat says a good deal about how freely wild game moved through the market-stall economy of the period. That economy ended within a generation: the Lacey Act of 1900 and then the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 shut down commercial traffic in wild birds, and dishes like this one passed out of restaurant cooking altogether. The pear shape with a parsley stalk is a standard croquette conceit of French garde-manger work of the era, one of a family of moulded forms — cork, cutlet, ball — used to signal at a glance what was inside.