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Chicken Quenelles
Take one chicken, weighing at least three pounds, six tablespoonfuls of butter, a tablespoonful of chopped salt pork, four eggs, one gill of white stock, two gills of fresh milk, one small cupful of stale bread crumbs, about one teaspoonful of lemon juice, and the same of onion juice, salt and pepper. Cut the chicken from the bones; first remove the skin; pound the meat very fine. Mix pork with chicken and rub through a sieve. The bread and milk should be put on the fire and cooked together, stirring it all the time, being careful to have it smooth. Mix the chicken with the cooked bread and milk, adding the seasoning and the stock; if the stock is not convenient the same amount of cream may be substituted. Add yolks of eggs, and lastly the whites beaten very light.
Rub the sides of your pan well with butter, also the bottom. Have ready two tablespoons and a pan of boiling water. Dip one spoon in the water and then heap it full with the force-meat; dip the other spoon in hot water and turn the contents of the first into it. This process gives the quenelles the right shape; then slip at once into the frying pan. Carry on this until all the meat is shaped. Cover the quenelles with white stock, boiling, with little salt and cook very slowly about twenty minutes. Remove from pan and drain, then serve with mashed potatoes or fried bread. Pour a spoonful of Bechamel sauce on each and serve hot.
A classic panade-bound forcemeat, poached rather than fried, and it stands or falls on the temperature of the poaching liquid. Read the note on that first.
- Never let the liquid boilThe recipe says to cover with boiling stock and cook very slowly, and the second half of that is what matters. Hold the liquid at 165-175F, with barely a tremble on the surface; a rolling boil will swell the quenelles and break them apart. Poach one alone as a test before committing the whole batch, and adjust with more crumbs if it falls to pieces or more milk if it is dense.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. One gill of white stock is 4 fl oz, two gills of milk is 8 fl oz. The "small cupful" of crumbs is roughly 3/4 cup, loosely packed.
- The chickenA 3 lb bird yields about 1 1/4 lb of skinless boneless meat, which is what the forcemeat needs. Boneless thighs and breast in that quantity work identically. Save the carcass for the white stock the recipe calls for twice.
- PoundingWhere the original wants a mortar and a sieve, a food processor does it in a minute. Keep the meat and the bowl cold, pulse to a smooth paste, and pass it through a sieve afterwards anyway if you want the fine texture the name implies.
- Salt porkA tablespoon of chopped salt pork is there for fat and seasoning, not flavour in its own right. Unsmoked fatback or a little finely chopped pancetta stands in; if you use bacon, reduce the added salt.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp in a sieve, or squeeze grated onion in a cloth. A teaspoon is all you want, and bottled onion powder is not a substitute here.
- The panadeCrumbs and milk cooked together to a smooth thick paste is a panade; it must be cooled to room temperature before the puréed meat and eggs go in, or the yolks will set in streaks.
- Doneness and yieldTwenty minutes at a bare simmer is right for spoon-shaped quenelles of about two tablespoons; check that the centre reads 165F. The yield depends on how large you shape them; the batch will serve four to six as a main course with the potatoes and Béchamel.
Quenelle comes into English from the French, generally traced to the Alsatian German Knödel, dumpling, and the technique is the same one that produces the pike quenelles of Lyon: a pounded meat or fish paste lightened with egg and bound with a bread-and-milk panade, then poached. The two-spoon shaping described here survives in the modern cook's habit of forming ice cream and mousse into ovals.