Home › The World's Kitchen › Blanquette of Turkey with Mushrooms
Blanquette of Turkey with Mushrooms
Pick all meat from turkey left over from yesterday and cut in half-inch pieces. Mix in a saucepan an ounce each butter and flour, pour in a half pint broth, mix well and let boil for fifteen minutes. Mix on a plate one egg yolk, two tablespoons cream, the juice of half a sound lemon, and add to sauce, sharply mixing while adding. Add turkey with twelve sliced, canned mushrooms, season with a half teaspoon salt, saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg, mix well, heat for five minutes, but do not allow to boil. Transfer blanquette into a deep dish, arrange six heart-shaped croutons around and serve.
A classic French white ragout built on leftover roast turkey, and the whole dish turns on one step: the egg-and-cream liaison must never see a boil.
- The hinge: don't boil the liaisonOnce the yolk and cream go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer — roughly 170-180F. A boil curdles the yolk and the sauce breaks into grainy threads that no amount of whisking will bring back.
- Temper the yolkThe instruction to add the yolk mixture "sharply mixing while adding" is doing a lot of work. Safer to ladle a little hot sauce into the yolk and cream first, stir, then return the whole to the pan off the heat.
- MeasuresA half pint of broth is 1 cup. An ounce each of butter and flour is about 2 tablespoons butter and a scant 1/4 cup flour. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, and 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne is assertive — start with a pinch.
- That fifteen-minute boilNot a mistake. Simmering the roux and broth for a quarter hour cooks out the raw flour; a two-minute velouté tastes pasty. Note that an ounce of flour to a half pint of broth is already a stiff ratio, so stir occasionally and top up with broth if it tightens too far.
- Canned mushroomsStandard in books of this period and still workable, but drain and rinse them. Fresh button or cremini, sliced and sweated in butter until their water has gone, give a better result, and about 6 oz will stand in for the twelve canned ones.
- CroutonsBread cut into hearts and fried in clarified butter until crisp, not oven-toasted squares. They are a traditional garnish for a blanquette, arranged around the dish as the recipe directs.
- Lemon"A sound lemon" simply means one not soft or spoiled. Add the juice with the cream rather than to the hot sauce alone — acid hitting the pan straight can encourage the dairy to split.
- YieldRather less than the half pint of broth you started with, once it has simmered fifteen minutes, plus whatever meat a picked-over turkey gives; enough for three or four.
Blanquette comes from the French blanc, white: a ragout in which the meat is never browned and the sauce is thickened with a flour roux and finished with a liaison of egg yolk, cream and lemon. The best-known version is blanquette de veau, but the method was applied freely to chicken, rabbit and, as here, to yesterday's roast. That last point explains its place in a book of this vintage — the leftover-turkey blanquette let a cook put a recognisably French dish on the table out of cold meat, tinned mushrooms and a cup of broth. The heart-shaped croutons are pure classical garnish, a convention carried over from restaurant service into the domestic kitchen.