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Boulettes of Turkey, Finnoise
Pick all the meat from the turkey left over from yesterday. Cut it into very small dice pieces. Mix in a small saucepan one and a half tablespoons butter with two and a half tablespoons flour, pour in two gills milk and one gill cream, season with half teaspoon salt and a saltspoon each cayenne pepper and grated nutmeg. Mix with a wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, let boil for ten minutes, add the turkey, with one ounce chopped, lean, cooked ham, cut into small dices and one ounce of smoked beef tongue cut same way. Mix well and let cook for twenty-five minutes, add three tablespoons bread crumbs, two egg yolks, one tablespoon sherry and mix well while heating for five minutes. Remove, place the hash on a dish and let cool off. Divide and make twenty-four equal balls out of the preparation, lightly roll in melted butter, then in fresh bread crumbs, place in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat for eight minutes. Lift up, thoroughly drain, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, decorate with a little parsley greens and serve with a Finnoise sauce separately.
A leftover-turkey croquette bound with a very thick béchamel. Nearly everything hinges on how cold the mixture is before you shape it.
- Chill the panade hardThe mixture must be spread in a shallow pan and refrigerated until firm, ideally two hours or overnight. "Let cool off" on a dish will not get you there, and a barely cool paste will burst in the fryer.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills milk is 1 cup and one gill cream is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, which is a great deal of cayenne for this quantity; a pinch is closer to modern taste.
- The sauce is deliberately stiffThe sauce thickens as it goes -- One and a half tablespoons butter to two and a half tablespoons flour looks flour-heavy by volume, though by weight it is close to an ordinary equal-weight roux. The body comes largely from the long cooking and from the crumbs and yolks added at the end, and the mixture should be stiff enough to shape once it has cooled.
- Frying timeEight minutes is longer than a fully cooked filling needs. In a modern fryer at around 360-375F, well-chilled balls this size brown and heat through in a few minutes; much beyond that and the coating darkens.
- CoatingMelted butter and crumbs alone give a thin, fragile crust. Standard flour, beaten egg, then crumbs holds up much better in a basket, and a second crumb layer is worth the trouble.
- The cooking times before shapingTen minutes at a boil, then twenty-five more with the meat, is a long simmer for a thick sauce. Use low heat and stir often, or scorch on the pan bottom will flavour the whole batch.
- Smoked tongue and cooked hamAn ounce of each is a seasoning, not a filling. Deli-counter smoked tongue is scarce; a well-smoked ham or a little bresaola stands in for the salt-and-smoke note.
- YieldTwenty-four balls, so six servings of four as a first course or luncheon dish, four as a main.
- Finnoise sauceNot given here. It is generally described as a velouté or suprême finished with cream and a purée of sweet green pepper, sometimes with chopped herbs; any good creamy velouté with sweet pepper will suit the dish.
Filippini's International Cook Book gives a recipe that opens by telling you to pick over "the turkey left over from yesterday." Boulette is simply French for a small ball, and the whole method belongs to the great age of the croquette, when hotel and household kitchens turned cold meat into something presentable by dicing it fine, binding it in a stiff white sauce enriched with yolks, and deep-frying it. The name Finnoise, for the sauce served apart, follows the nineteenth-century convention of tagging classical sauces with national adjectives; it is usually traced to a velouté finished with cream and sweet pepper. The folded napkin and the sprigs of parsley are the standard service of the period, meant to absorb frying fat.