Home › The World's Kitchen › Emincee of Turkey, Ancienne
Emincee of Turkey, Ancienne
Detach the meat from the turkey left over from yesterday, then cut it in half inch pieces and keep till required. Cut the carcass in pieces and place all the bones in saucepan, add half the piece of pork left over from yesterday, one carrot cut in quarters, two peeled, sound, raw potatoes and twelve small, peeled white onions. Moisten with a pint and a half of water. Season with teaspoon salt, cover the pan and let boil forty minutes. Place in a saucepan one ounce butter with one and a half ounces flour, stir well on the fire one minute, then strain the broth through a cheesecloth into the pan, sharply mix with a whisk until it comes to a boil. Cut the potatoes and pork in half-inch-square pieces and add them to the sauce with the twelve onions and turkey. Season with saltspoon cayenne and half teaspoon chopped parsley. Carefully mix, then cook five minutes. Transfer into a hot dish and serve.
A next-day dish that builds its own stock from the carcass, then uses the vegetables cooked in that stock as the garnish. It works, but the original assumes you cooked yesterday's dinner from the same book.
- What an émincé isNot mince in the ground-meat sense but meat cut in thin slices or small even pieces and reheated in sauce. "Ancienne" here signals the old-style white ragout finish: butter-flour roux, no browning, no cream.
- The porkThe recipe assumes a piece of cooked pork from the previous day's menu; it does not say what kind or how much. Use a few ounces of any cooked pork, and if what you use is salty (salt pork, unsmoked bacon, lightly cured shoulder), hold back the teaspoon of salt until you taste the finished sauce.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. A quarter teaspoon of cayenne in a dish this size is assertive but not unreasonable; start with half if your cayenne is fresh.
- MeasuresA pint and a half is 3 cups. One ounce butter is 2 tablespoons; an ounce and a half of flour is about 1/3 cup, which works out to roughly the standard proportion for a veloute.
- The vegetables do double dutyThe potatoes and onions are simmered in the stock and then retrieved for the finished dish, so the onions need to be small and sound enough to stay whole and the potatoes firm enough to be cut up afterwards. Forty minutes is a long boil for potatoes; watch that they do not collapse into the broth. The carrot is a flavouring and is not returned to the dish.
- The five-minute finishEverything going back into the sauce is already cooked. The final five minutes is to heat through and marry, not to cook the turkey further; leftover breast meat turns dry and stringy if held longer.
- YieldServes four as a main course with rice, toast points or boiled potatoes.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), and it belongs to a class of recipe that has largely disappeared from cookbooks: the planned second appearance. Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, organised much of his work around daily menus, so a dish could reasonably begin "the turkey left over from yesterday" and "half the piece of pork left over from yesterday" and expect the reader to know exactly what was meant. The technique behind it is straightforwardly French household cookery -- a carcass stock, a white roux, cooked meat warmed in the resulting veloute -- and the label a l'ancienne was by then a conventional way of saying the sauce is finished the old way, with butter and flour and small onions, rather than in any newer style. Roast turkey in America was long associated with holiday and hotel tables, which is part of why a leftovers recipe for it earns a place in a book otherwise full of first appearances.