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Turkey Marquise
(Paris.) Cut the white meat of a boiled turkey into strips 2 by 4 inches. Dip each in a forcemeat, covering well, made of 6 ounces of bread-crumbs soaked in milk, 4 ounces of tongue, and 6 oysters, cut fine; add 3 tablespoonfuls of white stock, pepper, salt, and 2 eggs. This must be well beaten, seasoned, and pressed through a sieve. Place in a buttered pan and bake 10 minutes until brown. Arrange carefully on a dish, in a circle, and in the centre pour some Brussels sprouts cooked in white sauce and some sauce poured over. Around the edge arrange a puree of chestnut, and let it steam, with a plate over all, 20 minutes. Serve in the same dish.
A late-Victorian way of turning leftover boiled turkey into a composed entree: strips of breast jacketed in a fish-and-tongue forcemeat, browned, then ringed with chestnut puree and sprouts. Nothing here is difficult, but the recipe assumes a cook who already knows what a forcemeat should feel like.
- The hinge: forcemeat consistencySqueeze the soaked crumbs nearly dry before working them with the tongue, oysters, stock and eggs, or the mixture will slide off the turkey in the oven. It should be a thick paste that holds a shape on a spoon, not a batter.
- Sieving"Pressed through a sieve" means forcing the beaten mixture through a fine drum sieve with a wooden spoon or scraper to smooth it. A food processor does the same job in seconds; pulse rather than run it, since overworking makes the coating dense.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. Ten minutes to brown implies a hot oven, roughly 425F. Judge by doneness rather than the clock: the forcemeat contains raw egg and raw oyster and should reach 165F at the centre, which on a coating this thin usually happens as the surface colours.
- TongueCooked salt tongue, most likely beef, a common butcher's item in the period and now usually a special order. Four ounces of good cooked ham or a firm mortadella gives a similar salty, faintly pink note if tongue is out of reach.
- OystersSix shucked oysters, chopped fine and folded in raw. They are seasoning here, not a component; drain them and add a spoonful of their liquor to the mixture if it seems stiff.
- White stockAn unroasted veal or poultry stock, pale and lightly seasoned. Ordinary unsalted chicken stock is the modern equivalent; three tablespoons is all that goes into the forcemeat.
- White sauce and chestnut pureeThe white sauce is a plain bechamel or a veloute made with the same white stock. For the puree, cooked peeled chestnuts (vacuum-packed are fine) simmered soft in stock or milk and mashed with butter until it holds its shape. The recipe gives no quantity; about a pound is a reasonable working estimate for a border around this dish.
- The final steamingTwenty minutes under an inverted plate appears to be a way of holding the dish hot and letting the parts settle together rather than a cooking step, since turkey, sprouts, puree and forcemeat are all already cooked. Ten minutes covered in a low oven, around 250F, achieves much the same thing without the sprouts going grey.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. The proportions suit the white meat of one turkey breast and would serve roughly four to six as a course. Assemble in the serving dish, as instructed, since the dish is meant to go to table in the same vessel.
The book is Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902), a collection of dishes gathered abroad and tagged with their city of origin, and the "(Paris.)" heading is doing real work: this is a professional French restaurant preparation written down for an American home cook. The construction is composed restaurant cookery of the period, meat masked in a forcemeat and set in a ring with a puree border piped around the edge, the sort of plated architecture that the codifiers of French practice in Escoffier's generation are often credited with formalizing. Names like "marquise" appear to have been attached fairly freely to garnished dishes, seemingly as a flourish of aristocratic association rather than a fixed formula, though the word also carries attested specific senses, so the title may tell you more about the style of service than about any particular ingredient. Its practical purpose is plainer still: turkey was a large bird bought for a feast, and the cold white meat afterwards was a standing problem that cookbooks of the era solved again and again with croquettes, hashes and dressed entrees like this one.