No. 921

Junot Palmettes

Palmettes a la Junot

Prepare a plover or woodcock mousseline (No. 87), adding to it some finely minced mushrooms and veloute sauce (No. 415); fill the molds, poach, and finish them exactly the same as for (No. 920); fry them in clarified butter, dress them crown shaped on a napkin and garnish with favor frills (No. 10). Serve separately a salmis sauce (No. 536), with some truffles cut in three-sixteenths of an inch squares.

← No. 920 Palmettes Hot Side Dishes No. 922 Perier Palmettes →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a cross-referenced entry from Ranhofer's Delmonico's manual, written for a brigade that already knew the base preparations by number. Nearly all the work happens in the recipes it points to; what follows is what a modern cook needs to reconstruct it.

The hinge: poach gently, then fryA mousseline forcemeat is cream-bound and will curdle or weep if the poaching water boils. Keep the bain-marie at a bare tremble, around 170F, until the centers are just set, chill the palmettes thoroughly, and only then brown them in clarified butter. Frying a warm, soft mousseline will break it.
Plover is off the tableGolden and black-bellied plover are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and its equivalents elsewhere; they cannot be shot, sold or served. Woodcock is the surviving option, and in the United States it is game only, never commercially sold, so it has to come from a licensed hunter. Farmed quail or squab is a reasonable substitute for the flavor, if not the character.
What a mousseline isRanhofer's No. 87 is raw game flesh pounded and sieved, seasoned, then worked over ice with egg white and heavy cream until it is a smooth, pale paste. Modern practice is the same thing in a food processor, everything cold, cream added last in a slow stream. Poach a spoonful as a test before filling the molds.
Palmette moldsSmall molds in the palm-leaf or fan shape the name describes. The recipe gives no size; any small individual mold will serve, since the shape is decorative, not functional.
Velouté and salmisVeloute and salmis -- Veloute (No. 415) is a light stock-based white sauce, here used sparingly to loosen the forcemeat. Salmis (No. 536) is the classic game sauce built from the roasted, chopped carcasses simmered with wine and stock, then strained and reduced -- it is the part of this dish that carries the flavor, and it needs the bones the birds came with.
Favor frillsNo. 10 is the paper frill, the same thing used on lamb chop bones. Purely ornamental and easily omitted; the folded napkin under fried items was conventional service of the period.
Truffle diceThree-sixteenths of an inch is a scant 5 mm. The recipe names only truffles; adding them to the finished sauce off the heat will keep their aroma.
Quantities and yieldThe original gives none. A mousseline made from about 12 oz of boned game flesh with a couple of egg whites and 10-12 fl oz cream will fill a dozen or so small molds, enough for six as a hot side dish in the Delmonico sense -- one course among many, not a main.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the house style at its most formal: a dish that exists almost entirely as a set of pointers to other numbered preparations, assembled by cooks who had them memorized. Garnishes and small hot entrées of this period were routinely named for military and political figures, and à la Junot is generally taken to honor Andoche Junot, duc d'Abrantès, one of Napoleon's generals -- the attribution is culinary convention rather than anything documented about the man's table. The reliance on plover and woodcock is the more telling detail. Wild shorebirds and small migratory game were staples of the nineteenth-century American luxury menu, sold openly in city markets by the barrel, and their disappearance from cookbooks tracks the market-hunting collapse and the protective legislation that followed in the early twentieth century.