No. 914
Richmond Mousseline
Mousseline a la Richmond
Ranhofer wrote for a professional brigade with a stocked larder, so this entry is little more than a set of cross-references. The whole dish hinges on the forcemeat: a game mousseline is meat, egg white and cream held in emulsion, and it will break if it warms up.
- Keep everything coldPound or process the boned game while it is thoroughly chilled, sieve it, then beat in the cream over ice. If the mixture is allowed to warm it tends to separate and poaches grainy rather than smooth. A test quenelle dropped in barely simmering water tells you whether it will hold.
- Working proportionsThe forcemeat is No. 87, which is not reproduced here. A standard mousseline working ratio is roughly equal weights of raw game flesh and heavy cream, with two to three egg whites per pound of meat, salt, and a little cayenne or nutmeg; check No. 87 for Ranhofer's own figures, and measure rather than eyeballing.
- The moldsSmall molds of the dariole or timbale type suit the quantity, well buttered and chilled; the recipe itself only refers to "the molds" and to the pattern in Fig. 226. The tongue and truffle are cut into thin strips or rounds and pressed onto the cold butter before the forcemeat goes in; the butter is the only glue, so the mold should go straight back to the refrigerator.
- TongueThe decoration calls for cooked, cured tongue, which is pink and firm enough to cut cleanly. Fresh braised tongue is grey and will not read against the black truffle. Good cooked ham or bresaola is a reasonable stand-in for color and firmness.
- Poaching, not baking"Finish as described for cardinal" points to No. 910, which for mousselines of this kind means covering the molds and poaching them in a bain-marie rather than baking. Hold the water below a boil, or the mousseline will souffle up and then collapse pitted with holes. Small molds will take roughly 15-20 minutes; cook until the centers are set, around 160F.
- Financiere sauceNo. 464 is not reproduced here; a financiere is conventionally a Madeira-scented demi-glace finished with truffle essence, the fuller financiere garnish adding cockscombs, mushrooms and olives. Cockscombs are hard to source; a Madeira demi-glace with sauteed mushrooms and chopped truffle or truffle peelings gives the intended effect. "Well buttered" means cold butter whisked in off the heat at the last moment.
- Choice of gameHare and grouse are strongly flavored and dark; farmed rabbit is mild and pale and will need the sauce to carry it. Remove every scrap of sinew before pounding, since sinew will not sieve and shows up as threads in the finished mousseline.
- YieldNo quantity is given. As a rough guide, a pound of boned game and a pint of cream should fill eight or so small molds, enough for eight as the hot side dish the section heading indicates.
This is one of a long run of numbered mousseline variations in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the compendium he assembled after some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York. The mousseline itself is a nineteenth-century refinement of the older quenelle: where a quenelle was bound with a bread or flour panada, the mousseline leans on egg white and a large proportion of cream, which gives the lighter texture the name points to. The garnish names in this section are mostly borrowed from French service usage rather than invented in New York, and "a la Richmond" is the kind of proper-noun label that attached itself to a particular combination of tongue, truffle and financiere garnish; the attribution is conventional rather than documented. What the entry really shows is how such books worked in a professional kitchen: three lines of text pointing at four other numbered recipes, useless to a home cook and perfectly clear to a chef de partie who had the forcemeat and the sauce already standing.