Today, a roast means a nice cut of meat cooked in dry heat—on the spit or the grill, in the fireplace or rotisserie, or even oven-roasted. In fact, my butcher would probably consider the oven the best way to roast a good piece of meat. But the concept was formerly much narrower: eighteenth-century dictionaries define the roast as meat “roasted on the spit” in the fireplace, since rotisseries do not seem to have appeared until the early nineteenth century. Even then, meat cooked this way was not always served as a second-course roast dish: it was often brought to the table as a first-course “spit-roasted entrée,” “main entrée,” or simple entrée, at least according to La Cuisinière bourgeoise. How did such entrées differ from the true roast?
Preparation for cooking was the first difference. Grimod de La Reynière states that a small roast must “always be barded, or studded” with lard. Sometimes, in season, domestic pigeons, quail, and woodcock were wrapped in grape leaves as well as barded. These were roasts just the same. On the other hand, if a meat was studded with something other than lard, it became an entrée, like the “Gigot à la Génoise” studded with celery, tarragon, pickles, lard, and a few anchovies; and the “Épaule de Mouton à la Roussie” (i.e., “Russian style”), larded with two handfuls of parsley before being skewered on the spit.
Barded with lard and wrapped in grape leaves, the roast was still ultimately supposed to “brown nicely,” even though this is easier to do if the birds are studded. To turn the same meat into a spit-roasted entrée, it was barded with lard and wrapped in buttered paper to keep it from browning, as in this model chicken recipe from La Cuisinière bourgeoise: “Cook them on the spit, wrapped in lard and paper. Keep the fire moderate so they won’t brown, because a chicken entrée cooked on a spit must be left pale.” Paper wrapping defined the spit-roasted entrée in every case: turkey, hen, pigeon, pheasant, teal, partridge, woodcock, quail, thrush, and plover.
Less browned than a roast and therefore less tasty, the spit-roasted entrée usually gained additional flavor from stuffing, sauce, or ragoût: “When your chickens are done, transfer them to the platter... & add what sauce or ragoût you wish.” The meat was not cooked again in its sauce, as it was in the Middle Ages. It became an entrée when covered with the sauce or, in the seventeenth century, set on top of it. The ragoût was simply arranged on the platter around the meat or, according to Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois, spread underneath it like a sauce.
La Cuisinière bourgeoise never mentions any stuffing in connection with roasts, but its recipe for “pheasant or young pheasant” shows the extent to which stuffing characterized spit-roasted entrées: To serve “as a roast,” first clean and stud them, then “cook on the spit and serve when nicely browned.” However, “To serve... as a spit-roasted entrée, cook on the spit, stuffed with their livers chopped with minced lard, parsley, chives, salt, and coarse pepper; bard them with lard and wrap with paper; serve with Provençale sauce or some other nice little sauce in the modern style.”
A bird’s cavity could be empty or filled; a roast might retain the liver, heart, and gizzard, or hold an onion studded with three cloves. But as soon as the ingredients were chopped and combined into a stuffing, the dish became a spit-roasted entrée. Plovers are a good example: As roast, they were skewered without emptying the cavity. But “to serve as a spit-roasted entrée, prepare a stuffing from their organs as explained in the article on woodcocks,” that is, by discarding the gizzard, chopping the rest of the organs, and mixing with “minced lard or a piece of butter, chopped parsley and chives, a little salt.”
There is no proof, however, that stuffing alone turned a roast into an entrée, because the stuffed meats in La Cuisinière bourgeoise were always served with a sauce or ragoût. The stuffed, spit-roasted veal breast was served “with any sauce or vegetable ragoût you please”; the stuffed partridges, “with any sauce and ragoût you deem appropriate,” and likewise for stuffed woodcock and plover. Stuffings and ragoûts often had one ingredient in common, such as the chestnuts for stuffing spit-roasted goose — a main entrée of former times that has become the Christmas roast.
Choosing suitable roast meats
Various kinds of meats were suitable for the roast. According to the Almanach des gourmands, “The roast can be large or small. The first group includes butcher’s meat and venison, such as sirloin, lamb shoulder, veal loin, quarters of boar, deer, or roe deer; the second type includes fowl, game, and small birds.” Some meats, however, were not appropriate except for entrées or entremets, and even the suitable roast meats were not evenly distributed among the various functions.
La Cuisinière bourgeoise contains no roasts of organ meat, not even calf’s liver or beef tongue, which were sometimes served that way at the time of La Varenne. In addition—despite Grimod de La Reynière’s comments a few decades later—butcher’s meat was not considered suitable for roast: out of 127 such cuts whose function is known, there is only one, the lamb quarter (or possibly two if we count the lamb haunch), that can be called roast. The cookbook’s three menus confirm the instructions of the recipes.
The status of fowl and game is entirely different. Most feathered game could be used for roast: lark, woodcock, snipe, quail, mallard, various wild ducks, pheasant, thrush, blackbird, grouse, plover, ortolan, wood pigeon robin, teal, and lapwing. The exception was the scoter [a sea duck], the one bird that could be eaten on meatless days and that, if served without sauce, would have been a true mortification.
The same applied to domestic fowl: Rouen duckling, turkey, various domesticated pigeons, guinea fowl, hen and capon, Caux hen and nonmated rooster, fattened chicken with eggs, and chicken à la reine. There were three exceptions: gosling and especially goose, as well as domesticated duck, whose meat, long said to be indigestible, came to be considered vulgar. The best tables replaced them with turkey toms and hens and with wild ducks.
La Cuisinière bourgeoise did not introduce this distribution of various meats among entrée and roast. The preface to the 1750–1751 edition of Massialot’s Cuisinier royal et bourgeois states that “with respect to entrées, half of them must consist of large joints that are butcher’s cuts and other meats like beef, veal, mutton, veal organs, lamb trotters, tongues and tails, fresh pork, salt pork, sausages, andouilles, and blood pudding; while the other half must consist of lighter selections such as delicate meats—chickens, hens, pigeons, turkeys, ducks, and ducklings—or game, partridges, quail, pheasant, or hares. The roast must feature half white and half dark meat, game and fowl, studded and barded preparations.”
It is true that game and especially domesticated fowl provided more recipes for entrées than for roasts. In La Cuisinière bourgeoise, feathered game accounts for 25 [sic] entrées and 18 roasts, while domestic fowl is used for 114 entrées or hors d’oeuvres and only 8 roasts.18 But this is mainly because entrées were much more varied than roasts.
An analysis of menus discloses the real proportion of each category of meat in entrées and roasts. The three Cuisinière bourgeoise menus, for instance, are unequivocal. In the dinner for twelve, fowl and small game provide 2 of the 4 entrées and both roasts (a hare and four small domestic pigeons); in the supper for ten, they account for 1 of the 2 entrées and both roasts (2 small hares and 2 chickens à la reine); in the setting for fourteen, 2 of the 4 entrées and all 4 roasts (a hen, three partridges, eighteen skylarks, and one Rouen duckling). Neither fowl nor game appears in the soups, the centerpieces of the first course, or the entremets of any of those three meals. It is significant that all told, wild hare included, fowl and game account for 1 hors d’oeuvre out of 10, half of the 10 entrées, and all of the roasts.
Furred game, especially small game, was similarly distributed. Out of the six varieties mentioned in La Cuisinière bourgeoise, the 3 young rabbits, young hares, and young boars provided the roasts. But the same six species of game furnished a much higher number of entrées (11 of young rabbit, 5 of rabbit, 2 of hare, and 2 of young hare) and hors d’oeuvres (3 of young rabbit, 2 of rabbit, and 2 of hare fillets) for a total of 27 hors d’oeuvres or entrées. Still, the menus reveal that furred game was used for roast less often than feathered game but more often than butcher’s meat and even domestic fowl: the same three menus feature furred game as a roast and as an hors d’oeuvre with equal frequency (twice) and never as an entrée or soup.
In conclusion, the various types of meat were distributed very differently among the stages of the meal: Organ meats were used only for hors d’oeuvres and entrées or entremets. Butcher’s meat provided hardly any roasts (1 to 3 out of 127 butcher’s meat recipes), few entremets (19), but many entrées (103) and hors d’oeuvres (23). Domestic fowl and especially furred or feathered game were essential for roasts. Menus show this better than recipes, since they list these three categories under roasts more often than under entrées and hors d’oeuvres.
By Jean-Louis Flandrin in "Arranging the Meat - A History of Table Service in France", (translated by Julie E. Johnson with Sylvie and Antonio Roder), University of California Press, USA,2007, excerpts pp. 13-17. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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