Stuffed Pheasant Breasts With Wild-Mushroom Sauce

This dish is named for Gaston Lenotre’s hunting lodge, Les Bastes, in Sennely, France. Though the recipe is long and appears complicated, much of the work can be done rather quickly ahead of time.

Ingredients

• 2 pheasants with their livers
• 1 large piece of caul fat
• 2 egg whites
• Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
• ½ teaspoon paprika
• 1 cup creme fraiche (see recipe)
• 3 tablespoons butter
• Shallot and wild-mushroom sauce (see recipe)

Four to six servings

Preparation

1. Separate legs and thighs from each bird. Remove and reserve skin, then cut meat away from the bones, being careful to remove small bones and gristle. Set aside.
2. Skin, then bone the breasts. The procedure is exactly the same as for a chicken: With the bird lying on its back, use a sharp knife to make a deep incision just beside the breast bone. Then pull the meat – called the supreme – away from the carcass. Repeat the procedure for the other breast, and for remaining pheasant. On the inner side of each breast there will be a small fillet. Remove the stringy nerve from each of them. Using a broad knife blade, pound the small fillets slightly to flatten and set aside.
3. Cut deep pockets into each of the supremes for stuffing, taking care not to pierce all the way through. Set aside.
4. Use skin, carcass, heart, gizzard and wings to prepare a stock, as one would prepare chicken stock.
5. Rinse caul fat under cold water for several minutes, then drain well.
6. Prepare the stuffing. Put dark meat from legs and thighs through a meat grinder, or grind in a food processor. Add egg whites, season with salt, pepper and paprika, and pass through a fine mesh sieve, using a stiff plastic scraper, or, if available, use the fine mesh sieve attachment of an electric mixer. Combine meat and egg mixture with the creme fraiche in a mixing bowl and whip with an electric beater for several minutes, or until the mixture is very elastic.
7. Saute pheasant livers in butter for about two minutes.
8. Open each supreme, carefully add stuffing and in the center of each place half of a sauteed liver. Close supremes so that no stuffing seeps out, and cover the opening with the flattened fillets from Step 2. Wrap each stuffed supreme in a single layer of caul fat. This can be done several hours ahead, then refrigerated. Remove pheasant from the refrigerator about 30 minutes before cooking.
9. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
10. Salt and pepper each supreme, then brown on both sides in butter. Place su-premes in a shallow, buttered pan, cover with foil and bake for 30 minutes. While pheasant is cooking, prepare sauce and figs.
11. To serve, cut each packet on the bias into five or six thin slices, arrange on warm plates and serve with shallot and wildmushroom sauce. The caul fat should have cooked away, and so need not be removed for serving.

1 hour 45 minutes