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Toulouse Pie
Toulouse is celebrated for its cookery of sweet-breads. Make a tall tart or high pie, as in above recipe, and fill the crust with a mixture of 2 cups of white stock or Bechamel sauce, 6 button mushrooms, 6 sliced truffles, 6 forcemeat balls made of chicken, bread-crumbs, herbs, and yolk of egg, add 2 sweetbreads, parboiled and cut into 1 inch squares. Heat these, all having been previously cooked together, and pour into the vol-au-vent or pie.
This is a garnish recipe more than a pie recipe: the pastry case is baked empty and a finished ragout is spooned in at the table. Everything depends on the filling being fully cooked and correctly thickened before it meets the crust.
- The hinge: fill at the last momentThe vol-au-vent or raised case is baked blind and the hot filling goes in just before serving. Filling early, or baking the two together, turns the pastry to paste.
- Sweetbreads need more prep than "parboiled"Veal sweetbreads should be soaked in several changes of cold water for a few hours, blanched from cold water to a simmer for 3-5 minutes, refreshed, then peeled of membrane and pressed under a weighted plate until firm. Only then will they cut into clean one-inch squares. Cook them through before they go into the sauce; guidance for offal is generally an internal temperature of 160F.
- "White stock or Bechamel"Two cups. White stock is unthickened veal or chicken stock, which will need a blond roux or a liaison of egg yolk and cream to coat the meat; bechamel is already thickened. Either way you want a sauce that clings, not one that pools in the crust.
- Button mushroomsSix buttons is roughly 3-4 oz. Turned or left whole, they should be cooked separately in a little butter and lemon juice so they stay pale, then added to the sauce.
- TrufflesSix sliced truffles was an unremarkable quantity when the book was written and an extravagance now. A single small black truffle, shaved, gives the same effect; jarred truffle peelings are the honest budget substitute. Truffle oil is not the same thing and will overwhelm the sauce.
- Forcemeat ballsRaw chicken pounded or processed with fresh breadcrumbs, chopped herbs and egg yolk, rolled marble-sized and poached gently in stock for 5-8 minutes until firm and cooked through. Do not boil them hard or they break up.
- "Previously cooked together"The instruction means the components are each cooked, then warmed in the sauce to marry, not simmered at length. Five minutes below a boil is enough; longer and the sweetbreads tighten and the quenelles fall apart.
- The crust"As in above recipe" refers back to the preceding entry, presumably the raised or vol-au-vent case. A bought all-butter puff pastry case, or two stacked and cut rings baked in a modern oven at about 400F until risen and dry, does the job.
- YieldServes four to six as an entree course, that is, a small plated dish rather than a main meal.
The name points not to a regional specialty of the city so much as to a fixed piece of French professional vocabulary: garniture a la Toulousaine, a white ragout of sweetbreads, quenelles, mushrooms and truffles bound in a velvety sauce, served in a pastry case. Nineteenth-century kitchen manuals list it among the standard white garnishes, and it is the sort of thing a chef of the period could send out without consulting anything. The claim that Toulouse is "celebrated for its cookery of sweet-breads" is the traveller's gloss rather than the technical fact; the garnish is generally traced to the classic repertoire rather than to any documented Toulousain dish.