Home › The World's Kitchen › Boulettes of Beef, Emilie
Boulettes of Beef, Emilie
Cut off all lean meat from roast beef left over from Saturday's dinner, keep on a plate, and add meat of six country sausages to it. Brown a finely chopped onion in frying pan with a teaspoon butter for five minutes and add to meat. Place all on a board with a teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, half saltspoon nutmeg, and finely chop the whole to a smooth hash. Boil two peeled, medium potatoes in salted water for thirty-five minutes, drain, press through a potato masher into a vessel, add hash to potatoes with an egg and sharply mix. Divide into twelve equal parts, roll in flour to ball-shaped forms, place in frying basket and fry in boiling fat for ten minutes. Lift up, drain on a hot dish, decorate with a little parsley greens and serve with piquante sauce separately.
A leftovers dish built on Sunday from Saturday's roast, bound with potato and raw sausage meat. The one thing to watch is that the sausage is uncooked when the balls go into the fat, so the interior has to reach a safe temperature before the crust goes too dark.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "half saltspoon nutmeg" is an eighth of a teaspoon. Freshly grated makes a noticeable difference at that quantity.
- Six country sausagesSizes varied, so treat this as roughly half a pound of bulk breakfast sausage, casings slipped off if you buy links. It supplies the fat that keeps dry roast beef from turning to sawdust.
- "Boiling fat"Deep fat at a brisk frizzle, within the usual deep-frying range of roughly 350-375F. Fat does not boil; the bubbling is water leaving the food.
- Ten minutes is too long at that heatBalls this size colour hard in three to four minutes at 365F. Fry at a slightly lower 340-350F if you want the raw sausage in the middle to reach 160F before the outside blackens, and check one with a thermometer.
- The potatoesThirty-five minutes on whole peeled potatoes assumes large ones and a slow stove. Cut them in chunks and boil until a knife slides through, then dry them in the empty hot pan so the mixture is not slack.
- Chopping on a boardThe original wants everything chopped together to a fine hash on the board. A food processor will do it, but in short pulses; run it long and you get a paste that fries into something rubbery.
- Flouring and holdingChill the shaped balls for twenty minutes before flouring. Cold, firm balls hold their shape in the basket where warm ones slump and split.
- Piquante sauceThe classic version is a brown sauce sharpened with a vinegar-and-shallot reduction and finished with chopped cornichons and herbs. Any sharp brown or mustard sauce serves the same purpose against the rich fried potato.
- YieldTwelve balls, which is four servings as a main course with a vegetable, or six as a first course.
Boulette is simply the French for a small ball of forcemeat, and the naming of this one after a woman, Emilie, is characteristic of the compendia associated with Alexander Filippini, long connected with Delmonico's in New York, in which hundreds of dishes carry the first names of patrons, staff and acquaintances. The dish itself belongs to the older tradition of the rechauffe, the reworking of the previous dinner's joint, which nineteenth-century household manuals treat as a matter of thrift and skill rather than apology. What marks it as professional rather than domestic is the deep frying basket, standard equipment in a restaurant kitchen with a permanent fat kettle, and the assumption that a piquante sauce is simply on hand.