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Bonne Bouchee of Turkey
Pick off all the meat from turkey left over from yesterday and cut it in half-inch pieces. Cut also two ounces cooked lean ham and one ounce cooked smoked beef tongue. Finely slice six good-sized, well-cleaned fresh mushrooms and place them in a saucepan with one ounce butter and gently fry them for five minutes, stirring occasionally. Add one ounce sifted flour, stir well while heating for one minute, moisten with pint broth, season with a half teaspoon salt, saltspoon cayenne and saltspoon grated nutmeg, constantly mix until it comes to a boil, then let cook for ten minutes. Add the above articles with two tablespoons sherry, mix well and cook for ten minutes more, remove and keep on a table. Boil four peeled potatoes in a quart of water with teaspoon salt for thirty minutes, drain on a sieve, then press them through a potato masher into a sauteuse. Add two raw eggs, half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, and sharply stir on the fire with spatula until well dried. Butter well a plain quart pudding mould, line all over the inside with three-quarters of the potatoes, pour the turkey fricassee in the centre, spread balance of potatoes over, cover it with a buttered paper and set in the oven for forty-five minutes. Remove, lift up paper, unmould on a hot dish, pour cream sauce around and serve.
A leftover-turkey fricassee baked inside a potato crust, in the manner of a French pain or moulded pudding. The hinge is the potato lining: it has to be stiff and dry enough to hold a wall, or the filling will seep and the mould will collapse when turned out.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the cayenne and nutmeg are 1/4 teaspoon each, and the "three saltspoons pepper" in the potatoes is 3/4 teaspoon.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits: the filling is already cooked and the potato has been stirred over the fire with the eggs, so the 45 minutes is largely about setting the potato and heating through rather than browning.
- SauteuseA sauteuse is a wide, shallow, sloping-sided pan. Its purpose here is surface area: the mashed potato is stirred over heat to drive off moisture before the eggs go in. Any wide skillet or saute pan does the job.
- Drying the potato"Sharply stir on the fire until well dried" is the step people skip. Work the potato over medium heat until it pulls away from the pan in a mass and no steam rises. Wet potato will not stand up as a lining.
- Smoked tongue and hamAn ounce of cooked smoked beef tongue is a delicatessen item now rather than a pantry staple. Prosciutto cotto, a good boiled ham, or a little smoked pork will stand in without changing the character of the filling.
- Broth quantity"Moisten with pint broth" against one ounce each of butter and flour gives a thin sauce; expect to reduce it well during the two ten-minute cooks so the filling is thick enough not to soak the potato wall.
- Cream sauceNot specified; the book assumes the reader knows it. A plain white sauce of butter, flour and milk finished with cream will answer. Make it while the mould bakes and keep it warm.
- UnmouldingLet the mould rest five to ten minutes out of the oven before inverting, and run a thin knife around the rim first. Warm the serving dish, as the original directs.
- YieldA quart mould serves four generously, or six as part of a larger meal.
Bonne bouchée is French for "good mouthful", a phrase long used for a small savoury titbit, and one professional kitchens seem to have applied fairly loosely. What is really being done here is kitchen thrift: yesterday's roast turkey picked over and turned into a bound fricassee, then dressed up inside a moulded potato case so that it arrives at table looking like a deliberate creation rather than a remainder. The potato here — boiled, dried over the fire, enriched with egg — is close to the duchesse mixture used to line timbales and border platters throughout the era's cookery. Books of this kind assumed the reader already knew what a sauteuse was and how to make a cream sauce without being told, which is why the instructions are exact about saltspoons of cayenne and silent about the oven.