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Cutlets of Duck, Demi-Glace
Cut meat from breast of duck left over from yesterday into small square pieces. Cut into same shape two ounces cooked ham, six canned mushrooms and one small truffle. Mix in a saucepan one ounce butter with an ounce flour and stir on the fire until a nice light brown, then pour in two gills demi-glace and two tablespoons sherry. Mix well, let boil for ten minutes, add cut meat and other articles, with a half teaspoon each chopped parsley and chervil. Season with a half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg, mix well and let cook for ten minutes, occasionally stirring at bottom. Add two egg yolks, sharply stir while heating for two minutes, pour force in a dish and let cool off. Divide into six even parts, roll out on a lightly floured table to cutlet forms, dip in beaten egg, roll in bread crumbs, place in a frying basket and fry them in boiling fat for ten minutes. Lift up, drain well, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, adjust a paper frill at the end of each cutlet, decorate with a little parsley and serve.
This is a croquette in cutlet shape, built from leftover roast duck bound in a thick sauce. The bind is the whole game: if the mixture is not cold and stiff, the cutlets burst in the fat.
- Two gills of demi-glaceA gill is half a cup, so this is one cup. Demi-glace here means the classic reduction of brown stock and espagnole; a good jarred concentrate diluted to sauce strength works, or use one cup of well-reduced brown stock.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A quarter teaspoon of cayenne in this quantity is assertive but not unreasonable; the nutmeg at the same measure will dominate if you use freshly grated, so start with half.
- "Pour force in a dish""Force" is forcemeat, the bound mixture. Spread it no more than an inch deep so it cools quickly and evenly, and refrigerate until genuinely firm, at least two hours. Overnight is better.
- Frying timeTen minutes in the fat is far too long for a mixture that is already cooked through. The recipe says only "boiling fat"; in a modern kitchen, fat hot enough to brown briskly (in the region of 350-360F) will colour the crumbed cutlets in three to four minutes, until the crust is deep gold. Longer and the interior boils, steams and splits the coating.
- ChervilOften unavailable fresh. Flat-leaf parsley with a pinch of tarragon gives the closest approximation of its faint anise note; do not substitute dried chervil, which tastes of nothing.
- Truffle and canned mushroomsThe truffle is a garnish of texture and aroma rather than structure, and can be left out without harm. Canned mushrooms were readily available to kitchens of this period; sauteed and well-drained fresh mushrooms are better here, since excess moisture is the enemy of the bind.
- ShapingWet or lightly floured hands, and a light touch. The traditional cutlet form is a flattened teardrop, thicker at the wide end, with the point where the paper frill goes.
- YieldSix cutlets, which is a first course for six or a main course for three with a green salad. The paper frill is optional theatre.
This belongs to the leftover economy of the professional kitchen rather than to any regional tradition: a cook with yesterday's roast duck, a pot of demi-glace already on the stove and ham and mushrooms in the larder could turn scraps into a dish that looked deliberate. Shaping croquette mixture into a cutlet and finishing it with a paper frill is a familiar convention of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century restaurant cookery; the frill is usually said to derive from the paper used to keep grease off the fingers when eating a chop by hand, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented, and here it dresses something with no bone at all. The book collects large numbers of such hotel-kitchen formulas, and the instruction to use "duck left over from yesterday" shows how closely the grand menu leaned on the previous day's roast.