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Small Goose Patties (Prepare and keep hot six)
Prepare and keep hot six patties. Pick out all the meat you can from the goose left over from yesterday cut the meat into small dice-pieces; cut also six heads canned mushrooms and one very small truffle into small squares. Place these three articles in a small saucepan with two tablespoons sherry or port wine. Season with half teaspoon salt and one saltspoon cayenne pepper, cook for five minutes, then pour in one and a half gills of demi-glace and half gill tomato sauce. Mix a little, then gently boil for fifteen minutes longer. Remove, arrange the six patty crusts on a large dish, divide the stew evenly in the six crusts, place the covers on top, decorate the dish with a little parsley greens and serve immediately.
A leftover-goose entrée built on classic French sauce work, written for a cook who already has demi-glace on hand. The only real difficulty is the sauce base; everything else is assembly.
- Patties means pastry casesThe "patties" and "patty crusts" are baked puff-pastry shells with lids — vol-au-vent or bouchée cases. Frozen ones are fine; warm them through in a 350F oven while the filling simmers, and hold the lids separately so they stay crisp.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of demi-glace is 3/4 cup and half a gill of tomato sauce is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon; a full quarter teaspoon of cayenne in this small a quantity is aggressive by current taste, so start with a pinch.
- Demi-glacePeriod kitchens kept a reduced brown sauce standing. Commercial demi-glace concentrate diluted per the jar works, or reduce 1 1/2 cups good brown stock with a little tomato until it coats a spoon. Bouillon cubes will only give you salt.
- Truffle and mushrooms"Six heads canned mushrooms" means six whole button caps, diced. The truffle is a garnish for aroma more than substance — a teaspoon of chopped preserved truffle or a few drops of truffle oil stirred in off the heat is the practical substitute, and the dish is still good with neither.
- The hinge: cooked meat, short heatThe goose is already roasted. Fifteen minutes of gentle simmering is meant to reduce and marry the sauce, not to cook the meat, so keep it at a bare tremble and add the diced goose toward the end if your bird was lean. Hard boiling will shred it and turn it dry.
- Reheating leftover roastBring the filling fully back to a steaming simmer before it goes into the shells — leftover poultry held a day in the refrigerator should be reheated through, not merely warmed.
- Fill at the last momentPastry cases go soggy within minutes of meeting sauce. Spoon in the filling at the table's edge, cap them, and serve at once.
- YieldSix patties, which is a first course for six or a light main for three with a salad. You need roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of picked goose meat.
Small filled pastry cases like these were one answer to the problem of a large roast bird: a goose might feed a household on Sunday and reappear on Monday as a ragout in a crust, dressed up with mushrooms, truffle and fortified wine so that no one would mistake it for leftovers. The pastry shell itself descends from the French vol-au-vent, which kitchen tradition generally credits to Antonin Careme's circle, though the attribution is not documented. The recipe's real period marker is the casual instruction to pour in demi-glace: it assumes a cook with a stockpot always going and a reduced brown sauce in the larder, an assumption that separates a professional kitchen of that era from most home kitchens now.