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Veal Quenelles
Veal quenelles are prepared in the same manner as chicken quenelles. ICED SAVORY SOUFFLÉ.
Cut up crab into small pieces, let it soak in mayonnaise sauce for two hours. Have some aspic jelly, half liquid, whip it until it is very frothy, put some of it in the dish it is to be served in; then place a layer of crab well seasoned, and fill it up with aspic and crab alternately until the dish is nearly full; place a band of stiff paper around and fill in with whipped aspic. Set on ice for two hours, take off the paper and serve. This can be made of fish, chicken or game.
TOMATO SOUFFLÉ.
Prepare some tomato pulp, taking care to boil it down if too liquid; stir in the yolks of three eggs, then the whites, well beaten, salt to taste. Fill either a large soufflé case or several small ones, baking in a hot oven until it rises very high and is set in the center. Serve instantly. COLD CHEESE SOUFFLÉ.
Grate one and a half ounces of Swiss cheese, the same of Parmesan; whip one-half pint of cream and a gill of aspic jelly to a froth; stir in the cheese, season with salt, cayenne and made mustard to taste. Fill little baskets, grate cheese over the top and set in ice to get firm. This mixture may be frozen like ice cream, but very firm, cut in little cubes and serve on canapes of fried bread.
Three cold-or-hot savory dishes run together under one heading, with the veal quenelles reduced to a single cross-reference. Each stands on its own; the two aspic dishes are essentially chilled mousses rather than soufflés in the baked sense.
- The quenelle lineThe book gives no method here at all — it points back to its chicken quenelle recipe, with veal in place of the chicken. Period quenelle forcemeats are generally pounded meat worked with a panada and bound with egg and cream, then poached in barely trembling stock, but this page gives no proportions.
- Aspic jellyThis means a savory gelatine set with strong veal or chicken stock, clarified. "Half liquid" is the stage where it has begun to thicken at the edges but still pours; that is the only point at which it will whip to a froth. Too warm and it stays soup, too cool and it seizes into lumps.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. One and a half ounces each of Swiss and Parmesan is roughly a half cup of each once grated.
- Hot ovenFor the tomato soufflé, roughly 425–450F. The book gives no timing: go by its own test, that it has risen very high and is set in the centre, with small cases taking considerably less time than a single large one. "Serve instantly" is not rhetoric — an eggy tomato purée with no flour to hold it will collapse within a minute or two of leaving the oven.
- Boil the tomato down hardThis is the hinge of the tomato soufflé. There is no roux and no starch, so the only thing standing between you and a wet omelette is a pulp thick enough to mound on a spoon. Reduce until a spatula leaves a clean track across the pan.
- Made mustardPrepared mustard from the jar, not dry powder. Dijon works; if you use dry mustard, slake it with a little water first and let it stand ten minutes.
- The paper bandA stiff collar tied around the dish so the whipped aspic can be piled above the rim, then peeled away to leave a standing dome. Parchment and kitchen string do the job.
- Raw-egg mayonnaiseThe crab is dressed in uncooked mayonnaise and never heated. Use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise, keep the crab refrigerated rather than merely "on ice," and serve the same day.
History: Quenelles and savory soufflés belong to the French repertoire that American cookbooks of this period drew on for their "company" chapters, and this page shows how compressed such borrowing could get — veal quenelles are dismissed in one line because the technique had already been given for chicken, and the remaining space goes to three dishes that showcase aspic. Gelatine was a fashionable ingredient: as sheet and powdered gelatines became more reliable and cheaper over the later nineteenth century, the laborious calf's-foot jelly of earlier books increasingly gave way to moulded and whipped aspics that could be built in layers, collared with paper and set on ice. Cold dishes of this kind were nonetheless called "soufflés" in period cookery, apparently by analogy with the puffed, lightened texture and the soufflé case, rather than in the strictly baked sense the word now carries.