No. 923

Primatice Palmettes

Palmettes a la Primatice

Fill some palmette molds with a doe-bird or plover quenelle forcemeat (No. 91) finished with an espagnole sauce (No. 414) and game fumet (No. 397): add to it some chopped truffles, and poach the forcemeat in a moderate oven; unmold, and dip the palmettes into eggs, and roll them in breadcrumbs mixed with finely chopped ham, fry them in clarified butter till a fine color. Then drain and dress them, garnishing with favor frills (No. 10). Serve separately a half-glaze sauce (No. 413) with tongue, mushrooms, and truffles, cut into very small squares, added to it.

← No. 922 Perier Palmettes Hot Side Dishes No. 924 Varsovian Palmettes →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's palmettes are a fried quenelle croquette, and the technique is sound, but the birds at the center of the dish are not obtainable. What follows explains the sticking points rather than offering a workaround.

The doe-bird cannot be had"Doe-bird" was a market name for the Eskimo curlew, hunted commercially in the 1880s and 1890s and considered functionally extinct today; no confirmed sighting has been accepted in decades. Nothing legal or ethical stands in for it, and no reader should be searching it out.
Plover are protectedWild plover are migratory shorebirds covered in the United States by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and by comparable law elsewhere. Taking, buying or selling them is prohibited, so the second option in the original is closed as well. If you want a fried forcemeat side dish, use a current recipe built on farmed poultry or game.
The half-dozen cross-referencesThe cross-references -- This entry is unusable without the rest of the book: No. 91 is the quenelle forcemeat, No. 414 espagnole, No. 397 the game fumet, No. 413 the half-glaze (No. 10 supplies the frills). In modern terms half-glaze is demi-glace, and the fumet is a concentrated game stock, not a fish stock in this context.
"Moderate oven"Period usage is usually read as somewhere in the region of 325-350F, though Ranhofer gives no figure. "Poach... in a moderate oven" implies the molds stood in water rather than in dry heat; the gentle heat is what sets the forcemeat without driving the cream and fat out of it.
Palmette molds and favor frillsPalmette molds are small fluted or fan-shaped tin molds, long out of general production; a small barquette or oval timbale mold is the nearest substitute. The "favor frills" of No. 10 are the paper cuffs of the period, purely decorative and not eaten.
Clarified butterFrying in clarified butter is deliberate: the milk solids are removed so the crumb and ham coating can color without the butter scorching. Whole butter will burn before the crust sets.
YieldNo quantity is given anywhere in the entry.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and its naming habits follow the French fashion of the day for dedicating garnishes to painters, composers and courtiers: Primatice is Francesco Primaticcio, the Bolognese painter who worked for Francois I at Fontainebleau. Ranhofer does not say why the name was chosen. The palmette itself, the stylized fan-shaped leaf, was a stock decorative motif, and shaping forcemeat into it is of a piece with a period that valued the silhouette of a side dish as much as its flavor. More telling is the forcemeat: doe-bird and plover appear casually here because American shorebirds were sold by the barrel in city markets in the 1880s and 1890s. The Lacey Act of 1900 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 came in response to exactly that trade, and the Eskimo curlew did not survive it. The recipe is now a document of a market that had to be shut down.