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Galantine of Turkey
(Montpellier.) Montpellier is 2 French town known far and wide for its ways of cooking cold meat or game in jelly or salad, served in a mould and often garnished, with mayonnaise or Tartare sauce. Clean, bone, and stuff a turkey with a forcemeat of equal parts bread, veal, ham, and tongue, adding herbs, onion, yolks of eggs. Tie the fowl in a cloth and cook it for four hours in sufficient stock to cover it. Let it cool, put in a mould with melted aspic jelly, decorating it with sliced truffles, hard-boiled eggs sliced, and capers. When cold and firm, turn out and serve in slices.
A full boned-and-rolled galantine is a two-day project, and the original assumes you already know the technique. The notes below fill in the quantities and temperatures the text leaves out.
- Bone the bird from the backSplit the skin down the backbone and work the flesh away from the carcass with a small sharp knife, leaving the skin intact so it can be rolled around the forcemeat. Reserve the bones and wing tips; they make the stock the galantine poaches in and give it the gelatine that sets the jelly.
- Forcemeat proportions"Equal parts bread, veal, ham, and tongue" was most likely meant by weight rather than volume, though the text does not say. For a 10-12 lb turkey, 8 oz of each is a modest amount and more will be wanted if the bird is large: the bread soaked in milk and squeezed, the veal ground, the ham and tongue diced so they show as mosaic in the slice. Two egg yolks will bind roughly that quantity.
- The cloth is structuralRoll the stuffed bird tightly in a scalded cloth or several layers of cheesecloth and tie it at intervals like a roast. Slack wrapping lets the forcemeat spread and the finished galantine will not slice cleanly.
- Four hours is generousAt a bare simmer, a galantine of this size is done in about 2 to 2 1/2 hours; the safe endpoint is 165F at the centre of the forcemeat, and a probe thermometer is worth more than the clock. The longer cooking in the original may simply reflect an uncertain fire rather than a requirement of the dish.
- Simmer, never boilThe stock should shiver, around 180F. A rolling boil bursts the skin, drives fat out of the veal, and clouds the stock you will later clarify for aspic.
- Cool under weightLeave the galantine in its cloth, press it lightly between two boards or trays with a couple of pounds on top, and chill overnight. This compacts the forcemeat and is what makes the decorated slices hold together.
- AspicClarify the cooking stock with egg white and shell, then set it with gelatine if it does not jell on its own -- about 1/4 to 1/2 oz powdered gelatine per pint, erring towards the larger amount if the jelly must be firm enough to unmould. Line the mould with a thin layer of aspic, set it, arrange the truffle, egg and capers face down, then fill.
- TrufflesFresh black truffle is a luxury purchase; tinned truffle peelings or a few slices of preserved truffle do the same decorative work. Blanched leek green or black olive gives the same dark contrast at no cost.
- YieldA galantine on this scale serves 15 to 20 as a cold buffet dish. Slice it cold with a long thin blade, wiping between cuts, and serve the mayonnaise or sauce tartare separately.
Galantine belongs to the tradition of cold moulded meat cookery that French kitchens refined through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a bird boned, stuffed, poached, pressed and glazed in its own clarified jelly, so that a single slice shows a pattern of pale forcemeat studded with ham, tongue and truffle. The name is often said to derive from Old French words for jelly, though the etymology is disputed, and the association with poultry in aspic is old enough that Careme and later Escoffier treat the form as standard rather than novel. The attribution to Montpellier here is looser than it sounds -- the headnote is describing a regional reputation for cold meats in jelly and salads rather than a specific local recipe. This is a Continental method presented to English-speaking cooks as something worth bringing home, at a moment when cold, elaborately decorated buffet dishes were the centrepiece of the ambitious household table.