No. 912

Isabella Mousseline

Mousseline Isabelle

Decorate mousseline molds (No. 2, Fig. 138) with red beef tongue and truffles; fill them with mousseline game forcemeat (No. 87), made either with snipe, plovers, doe-birds, or woodcock, finish them precisely the same as for the cardinal (No. 910); dress and serve separately a marsala sauce (No. 492), with chopped truffles.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a cross-referenced recipe from a professional kitchen manual: nearly every step points elsewhere in the book, and the birds it calls for can no longer be bought or, in one case, exist at all.

"Doe-birds" are Eskimo curlewThe doe-bird, or dough-bird, was the market name for the Eskimo curlew, shot in enormous numbers for East Coast tables in the nineteenth century. It has not been reliably recorded since the 1960s and is considered extinct or functionally so. There is no way to obtain one.
Plovers and snipe are protectedIn the United States, plovers and most shorebirds are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and cannot be hunted, sold or served. Wilson's snipe and American woodcock remain legal game in season for licensed hunters, but neither may be sold commercially, which is why they vanished from restaurant menus after the market-hunting bans.
Why the ban happenedCommercial demand from hotel and restaurant kitchens was one driver of the shorebird trade that the Lacey Act of 1900 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 (implementing the 1916 convention) were written to curb. Cook something else; use a current recipe for game or poultry mousseline.
What a mousseline forcemeat isRanhofer's No. 87 is raw meat pounded and sieved, then worked over ice with egg white and heavy cream until light and seasoned; in dishes like this one it is poached in molds. It is closely related to the quenelle and the modern mousse, and the technique itself is sound and still taught.
The moldsMousseline molds in this book are small individual molds, lined with a decor of cut shapes before filling. The tongue and truffle are pressed against the mold wall so the pattern appears on the surface after unmolding.
"Red beef tongue"Cured, cooked beef tongue, whose deep pink color was used purely as a decorative element against the pale forcemeat and black truffle. Ranhofer treats it as a pantry standby, sliced thin and cut with small fancy cutters.
"Finish as for the cardinal"No. 910 supplies the finishing method, which in Ranhofer's usage means gentle poaching in a water bath rather than boiling; a mousseline forcemeat brought to a hard boil will break and weep.
Marsala sauce served separatelyNo. 492 is a brown sauce finished with Marsala; here the recipe has it passed separately with chopped truffle stirred in, rather than poured over the mousselines.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the house style at its most systematic: a numbered mold, a numbered forcemeat, a numbered finishing method and a numbered sauce, assembled into a named dish. Personal names attached to garnishes and preparations in this period usually honored a patron, a performer or a member of a royal or noble family, but Ranhofer rarely explains his choices and no attribution for Isabella should be assumed. What the recipe does document plainly is the American appetite for wild shorebirds. Snipe, plover and curlew arrived at city markets by the barrel from Long Island, the Chesapeake and the prairies, and appear throughout the book as ordinary purchasable goods rather than luxuries. Within a generation of publication that trade was illegal, and the birds themselves were scarce or gone.