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Bitokes, Finnoise
Finely chop together two pounds raw lean lamb, and four ounces raw beef marrow, adding while chopping a half gill thick cream. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika, knead well, then divide force into six equal parts, giving nice cake-like forms, and lightly roll them in fresh bread crumbs. Heat two tablespoons leaf lard in sautoire, arrange bitokes in pan one beside another, cook rather slowly for five minutes, then set in oven for ten minutes. Remove, dress on a hot dish, pour a Finnoise sauce over and serve.
A Russian-style minced meat cake dressed in French fashion. The recipe assumes you have a companion sauce recipe and a butcher who will sell you marrow, so both need addressing before you start.
- Make the sauce firstFinnoise sauce is not given here; it is presumably a separate entry in the book. Sauces under that name are generally a velouté or cream sauce seasoned with paprika, and some versions add fennel or herbs, but the formula is not fixed. Have it made and warm before the bitokes go into the pan, since the cakes will not wait.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces, 4 tablespoons. Use heavy cream; "thick cream" in this period means something close to modern heavy or double cream, not sour cream.
- Beef marrowFour ounces of raw marrow scraped from cut marrow bones — ask a butcher for canoe-cut bones and you will get it easily. It is the fat and the tenderness in this dish. If unavailable, an equal weight of very cold beef suet or coarsely chopped fatty lamb shoulder is the nearest thing; do not simply use more lean meat or the cakes will be dry and crumbly.
- Leaf lard and the sautoireLeaf lard is the mild kidney fat of the pig, sold by some butchers and online; clarified butter or plain lard both work. A sautoire is a straight-sided shallow sauté pan — an ovenproof skillet covers both the stovetop and oven stages.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Treat this as a moderate oven, 375°F, following the five minutes of gentle browning on the stovetop. Ground lamb should reach 160°F on an instant-read thermometer; ten minutes will do it for cakes of this size, but check rather than assume.
- Chopping, not grindingHand-chopping with a heavy knife or two, as directed, gives a looser and better texture than a grinder. If you use a food processor, pulse briefly and keep the meat and marrow very cold so the fat does not smear.
- They are fragileThere is no egg or bread binder inside the force, only the kneading. Shape the cakes firmly, chill them fifteen minutes before cooking, crumb them lightly, and turn them once with a wide spatula.
- YieldSix cakes from two pounds of meat — generous, so figure six servings as a main course with the sauce, potatoes and a green vegetable.
Bitokes is the French spelling of the Russian bitki or bitochki, small beaten cutlets of chopped meat, from a verb meaning to beat or pound. The dish travelled west with the vogue for Russian cookery and Russian table service that swept French kitchens in the nineteenth century, and by the time this book was compiled bitokes had a settled place in the professional repertoire, served under a named sauce, though the formulas vary widely. The finnoise label belongs to the same habit of geographical garnish names; like à la russe or à la polonaise, it says more about a chef's filing system than about anything cooked in Finland. That the recipe leans on marrow rather than breadcrumbs is worth noticing: marrow bones were cheap and common.