No. 917

Mousseline of White Game a la Medicis

Mousseline de Gibier Blanc a la Medicis

Prepare a game mousseline forcemeat as described in the Elementary Methods (No. 87), made either with pheasants, partridges, or quails. Decorate some molds with truffles the same as shown in Fig. 229, and fill them with the mousseline (No. 2, Fig. 138) forcemeat made of any of the above or other white game; finish exactly as for the cardinal (No. 910), and serve with a buttered allemande sauce (No. 407), containing mushrooms cut into small Julienne (No. 318).

← No. 916 Mousseline a la Walesky Hot Side Dishes No. 918 Woodcock Mousseline →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer wrote for a professional brigade with the rest of The Epicurean at hand, so this entry is mostly a chain of cross-references. Here is what the numbers stand for and what actually governs the result.

The forcemeat, in modern termsA game mousseline is raw white meat from the breasts and thighs, trimmed clean of sinew, pounded and sieved (a food processor does it), bound with egg white, chilled hard, then worked with heavy cream over ice. Roughly equal weights of meat and cream, up to about 1.5 parts cream by weight for a very light result, seasoned with salt and a little white pepper.
The hinge: temperatureEverything must stay cold. Meat, bowl, blade and cream all near freezing; if the mixture warms while the cream goes in, the emulsion breaks and the mousseline weeps fat and water when poached. Poach a teaspoon of the mix in simmering water to check seasoning and set before filling the molds.
Molds and cookingDariole or small timbale molds, buttered, lined with cut shapes of truffle, filled and covered. Cook in a bain-marie, the water no more than a bare shiver, until the centers are just firm — roughly 20 to 25 minutes for 3 oz molds. Boiling water makes them spongy.
Allemande sauce (No. 407)A velouté reduced with mushroom cooking liquor and lemon, finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison and mounted with butter; classical versions reduce the sauce with the liaison over heat, but it should not be allowed to boil hard once the yolks are in. The mushrooms are cut in fine julienne and added at the end.
Game birdsWild-shot pheasant, partridge and quail taken in the United States cannot legally be sold; what is generally on the market is farmed, and that is what the recipe now means in practice. Quail breasts are small — allow several birds per portion of forcemeat. Use the carcasses, and any legs not going into the forcemeat, for the velouté base.
TrufflesRanhofer meant black winter truffle, used freely as a decorative element rather than for flavor. Preserved truffle peelings or slices give the same graphic effect at a fraction of the cost; truffle oil does not, and has no place in the lining of a mold.
YieldThe original gives none. As a hot side dish in the nineteenth-century sense — a course between the fish and the roast — figure one 3 oz mold per person, and about 1 lb of trimmed meat with 1 lb of cream for eight.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what came out of the Delmonico's kitchens in New York during his thirty-odd years as chef there, and this dish shows the house at its most French: a hot side dish built entirely from other numbered preparations in the same book, on the assumption that a trained kitchen already had forcemeat, truffles and allemande sauce on hand. The name is decorative rather than descriptive. À la Médicis appears across nineteenth-century French menus as one of a family of court-flattering titles, generally traced back to Catherine de' Medici and the persistent tradition that her Florentine household brought refined cookery to France — a story historians treat with considerable skepticism, but one that gave chefs a convenient label for anything rich and ornamental. Mousselines themselves were a genuine technical achievement of the period: the cream-lightened forcemeat depended on ice, which by the 1890s a first-class American kitchen had in abundance.