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Sans Gene
Cut into very small dice pieces one pound raw beef, half pound raw lean veal and a quarter pound raw, lean ham. Heat two tablespoons butter in a small saucepan, add two finely chopped shallots, one hashed carrot, a branch chopped celery and cook on the fire to a light brown. Place the hashed meat in the pan. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and a blade of foelie. (Foelie is the leaf of a dried nutmeg, much used in Holland and other lowland countries.) Moisten with pint and a half white broth, lightly mix. Cover the pan and let gently cook for one hour. Place four egg yolks in a bowl, mix well with a whisk, then gradually strain the broth of the meat over the eggs. Mix well with the whisk for a minute, then pour this into the hash; mix well, lightly butter a large, flat pudding mould, pour the preparation into the mould, place the mould on a pastry tin, pour hot water up to half the height of the mould. Set in the oven for thirty minutes, remove, unmould on a hot dish and serve.
A meat custard baked in a water bath — closer to a timbale than a pudding. The hinge is the egg: the strained broth must go into the yolks slowly and the mould must never see direct heat, or the whole thing curdles into grainy meat soup.
- Foelie is mace, not a leafThe parenthetical note in the original is wrong. Foelie is the Dutch word for mace, the lacy red aril that surrounds the nutmeg seed, sold dried in curved "blades." A blade is usually reckoned at somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 teaspoon of ground mace if you cannot find whole; add ground mace at the end of cooking rather than the start.
- White brothA pale unroasted stock, veal or chicken, made without browning the bones. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute. If the pint here is the American 16 fl oz pint, a pint and a half is 3 cups; on an imperial pint it would be nearer 3 3/4 cups.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 325-350F. Above that, the custard boils at the edges and weeps before the centre sets.
- The water bath is not optional"A pastry tin" is a sheet pan or roasting pan; the hot water should come halfway up the mould and be genuinely hot when it goes in, so the oven is not spending twenty minutes heating it.
- Temper the yolks properlyStrain the hot broth into the whisked yolks in a thin stream, whisking, then return the mixture to the meat. Tipping it in at once scrambles the yolks and no amount of whisking recovers the texture.
- Test for set, not for timeThirty minutes suits a wide shallow mould only. Judge by the centre: 170-175F on a thermometer, or a knife that comes out clean with no liquid pooling. A deep mould can take an hour.
- UnmouldingButter the mould heavily and let the custard rest 10 minutes out of the water bath before turning it out; straight from the oven it will slump. A flat, wide mould turns out far more reliably than a fluted one.
- Dice size"Very small dice" here means about 1/8 inch — a brunoise. Larger pieces sink through the custard and the slices fall apart. Trimming the beef and veal of sinew matters more than usual, since an hour of gentle simmering will not soften gristle.
- YieldAbout 1 3/4 lb of meat plus 3 cups of broth gives six modest servings as a first course, four as a main. Best warm rather than piping hot.
The name points to Madame Sans-Gêne, Victorien Sardou's 1893 hit play about Catherine Hübscher, the Alsatian laundress who became a duchess under Napoleon; the phrase means roughly "without embarrassment," and dishes were sometimes christened after it, as kitchens then christened dishes after popular actresses and operas. The dish itself is a French restaurant timbale — chopped meats bound with egg yolk and stock, baked au bain-marie — a form that let a kitchen turn cheap veal, beef and ham trimmings into something that could be unmoulded and carved at table. The Dutch word foelie is the odd note, and the compiler's mistaken gloss on it may suggest the recipe was picked up second-hand from a Low Countries source rather than written from the pan; mace, sweeter and gentler than nutmeg, was a common warm spice for pale forcemeats and white stews in northern Europe.