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Boudins of Chicken, Richelieu
Soak three ounces bread crumbs in cold milk five minutes, then squeeze out all milk, place bread in a mortar with three egg yolks and pound to a smooth paste. Skin and bone a tender raw chicken of one and a half pounds, then cut meat in very small square pieces. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, add one small, finely chopped onion and fry three minutes without browning, then add two light tablespoons flour; stir well, pour in one and a half gills cream, gill milk and two tablespoons sherry; mix until it comes to a boil. Add chicken, one small truffle cut in small squares, six canned mushrooms cut same way, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well and cook fifteen minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Add the pulp, sharply stir till well amalgamated. Transfer to a vessel and let cool off. Divide preparation into twelve even parts, roll out each piece on a lightly floured table to sausage form, dip in beaten eggs and roll in bread crumbs. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, arrange in the boudins one beside another, and fry to a nice golden colour. Pour a Madeira sauce on a dish, place the boudins over and serve.
A croquette in all but name: a bound chicken ragout, chilled, shaped, crumbed and fried. Everything depends on the mixture being cold and firm before you touch it.
- The hinge: chill it hard"Transfer to a vessel and let cool off" is doing more work than it admits. Spread the mixture in a shallow tray and refrigerate at least four hours, ideally overnight, until it is stiff enough to cut. Warm or merely cool, it will not roll into sausages and will burst in the pan.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of cream is 3/4 cup and a gill of milk is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is usually reckoned a quarter teaspoon: the cayenne comes to about 1/2 teaspoon, which is assertive by modern palates. Start with half that and adjust.
- The egg-yolk panadeThree ounces of crumbs soaked, squeezed and pounded with three yolks is a thickening and binding paste, not a garnish. Stir it into the hot mixture off the fierce heat, then return to a low flame for two or three minutes, stirring constantly, until it thickens and loses any raw-egg smell. If it goes in and is never cooked, the binder stays slack.
- Chicken sizeA 1.5 lb bird skinned and boned yields well under a pound of meat -- call it ten to twelve ounces. Thigh and breast meat off a larger modern chicken will make up the same weight; thigh meat stays moister through the fifteen-minute cook and the subsequent frying.
- Truffle and canned mushroomsA fresh black truffle is an extravagance here; a small jarred preserved truffle, or a teaspoon of truffle peelings with their liquor, gives the same perfume. The six canned mushrooms are the small button sort packed in brine -- an ounce or two of drained tinned buttons, diced, matches the intent better than fresh.
- Frying fatTwo tablespoons of butter in a pan will scorch before crumbed boudins colour evenly. Use clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, over medium heat, and turn them so all sides take colour. Finish in a 350F oven for five to eight minutes if the centres are still cold.
- Madeira sauceThe period sauce is a reduced brown sauce or demi-glace finished with Madeira. A good reduced chicken or veal stock, thickened lightly and given a splash of Madeira off the heat, serves the purpose without a day of stock work.
- YieldTwelve boudins, which is four servings as a main course with the sauce, or six as an entree in the older sense of a course between fish and roast.
Boudin in French cookery means a sausage shape rather than any particular filling, and by the late nineteenth century restaurant kitchens used the word for these forcemeat rolls bound with a bread-and-yolk panade, crumbed and fried first cousins to the croquette and to the quenelle. The name Richelieu attaches to a family of garnishes and preparations honoured in classical French service, generally traced to the eighteenth-century duc rather than the cardinal, and in practice it signals a certain air of expense. That such a dish appears in a book called The International Cook Book says a good deal about the period: for an American or British household of the 1900s, "international" cooking arguably meant, first and overwhelmingly, the professional French repertoire as it was practised in hotel kitchens, translated into gills and saltspoons for the domestic cook.