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Dolmas Gildisie
Finely chop a pound and a half of raw, lean mutton with tow ounces raw beef-kidney suet, place in a bowl with two ounces fresh bread crumbs and one and a half ounces raw rice. Season with a light teaspoon salt, three saltspoons paprika and three saltspoons curry powder, moisten with a gill broth, sharply stir with a wooden spoon until well amalgamated. Plunge twenty-four "vine leaves" into quart boiling water with tablespoon vinegar and boil for five minutes. Then thoroughly drain on a sieve, cut the leaves in two, arrange them on a table one beside another, and with a hair pastry brush lightly egg the surface of each. Evenly divide the preparation in the center of each half leaf, fold them up so as to entirely envelop the meat, place them in a lightly buttered sautoir folded part downward. Season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper, moisten with two gills broth. Finely chop three fresh, peeled, red tomatoes, add them to the dolmas with half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, cover the sautoir, then set in the oven for fifty minutes. Remove, carefully lift up with a skimmer, arrange them in a heap on a large hot dish. Pour a gill tomato sauce into the pan, let reduce on the open fire to half the quantity, strain it through a Chinese strainer over the dolmas and serve.
N. B. In the event that vine leaves are not at hand use cooked cabbage leaves instead.
A straightforward stuffed-vine-leaf recipe written in professional hotel shorthand, with weights in ounces and liquids in gills. Two conversions and one judgment about the leaves are all it really needs.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so a gill of broth is 4 fl oz and two gills is 1 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is 3/4 teaspoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all; the recipe says only to cover the sautoir and 'set in the oven.' A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a covered pan, and the fifty minutes is needed for the raw rice in the filling to swell.
- The sautoirA sautoir is a straight-sided saute pan; any wide, shallow, lidded pan that holds the rolls in one or two snug layers will do. Packing them tightly, seam down, is what stops them unrolling.
- Vine leaves todayThe five-minute boil with vinegar is for fresh leaves. Jarred leaves in brine, which are the easier ones to find, are already soft and salty: rinse them well in several changes of water and skip the boiling, or they may collapse.
- SaltWith brined leaves, hold back on the teaspoon-plus of added salt until you have tasted the rinsed leaves. The original assumes unsalted fresh ones.
- Beef-kidney suetRaw suet from around the kidney is sold by some butchers and is worth asking for; it keeps the lean mutton moist. Coarse-ground lamb fat, or simply using lamb shoulder rather than leg, achieves the same thing.
- Typo in the original"Tow ounces raw beef-kidney suet" is two ounces. The proportion is about one part fat to twelve parts meat, which is lean by modern taste; three ounces will not hurt.
- Egging the leavesBrushing each half leaf with beaten egg is a hotel trick to glue the fold shut. It is optional, and unnecessary if the rolls are packed tightly enough to hold each other closed.
- YieldTwenty-four leaves cut in two give forty-eight small rolls from roughly two pounds of filling: six generous portions as a main course, more as a first course.
Dolma comes from the Turkish dolmak, to be filled, and the word travelled with Ottoman cooking across the Balkans, the Levant, Greece and Armenia, which is why nearly identical stuffed vine leaves turn up under a dozen names. The second word here, "Gildisie," does not correspond to any standard dish name and is most likely a garbled transliteration. The method itself is thoroughly professional French: a sautoir, a hair pastry brush, a Chinese strainer, and a finishing sauce reduced by half in the cooking pan. The note offering cabbage leaves as a substitute is a practical concession to an American market where fresh grape leaves were seasonal at best.