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Fish Soup Quenelles
Pick out the meat from a lobster, and pound it, together with three ounces of butter. Season with salt and a quarter of a tea-spoonful of mace and cayenne pepper mixed together; blend the meat to a paste with the yolk of a raw egg, and add, while mixing, the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs and two table-spoonfuls of fine bread-crumbs. Mould in a tea-spoon and poach the quenelles for two or three minutes, or fry in butter a light brown before they are put into the soup. When used as an entree, or breakfast dish, serve with a good gravy, after being boiled or fried in butter. Time, ten minutes to fry for entree.
A forcemeat dumpling built on lobster and hard-boiled yolk rather than the usual whiting-and-cream panada. The book gives no lobster weight, so the ratios are the thing to watch.
- Quantity of lobsterThe book gives no weight. A whole cooked lobster of 1 1/2 to 2 lb picks out at roughly 5 to 8 oz of meat, which against 3 oz butter makes a rich but workable paste; if your meat comes in much under that, cut the butter back or the mixture will not hold.
- PoundingThe mortar work is a food processor job now. Pulse the meat and butter to a smooth paste, then add the raw yolk, sieved hard yolks and crumbs by pulse only, or the mixture turns pasty and heavy.
- Test one firstThe hinge of the recipe. Poach a single quenelle before shaping the rest: if it breaks up, work in another spoonful of crumbs; if it is dense and dry, another raw yolk loosens it.
- Moulding in a teaspoonTwo wetted teaspoons, passing the paste from one to the other, give the classic oval. Dip the spoons in hot water between each so the butter does not cling.
- Poaching liquid and heatUse lightly salted water or a fish stock held just below a simmer, around 180F. A rolling boil will shed the butter and split the quenelles, and two or three minutes is genuinely enough for teaspoon-sized ones.
- Mace and cayenneGround mace is still sold but fades fast; buy small quantities. A quarter teaspoon of the two mixed is mild by modern palates, though cayenne strength varies enough that it is worth tasting the raw paste on a fried scrap first.
- The ten-minute frying timeThis applies to the entree, which implies larger quenelles than the teaspoon-moulded ones for soup. Small ones browned for ten minutes will be dry and grainy; two to three minutes a side in foaming butter is plenty.
- Yield and serviceWith no weight given in the book, yield is guesswork: a 2 lb lobster might give something like two dozen teaspoon-sized quenelles. The book says they may be served as an entree or breakfast dish with a good gravy; it does not specify a number per person.
Quenelle is generally traced to the German Kn del, dumpling, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the word had settled into English professional cookery to mean a pounded forcemeat poached in small shapes. The quenelle was taught as a technique: master the paste and you could make it from veal, chicken, whiting or, as here, lobster, and deploy it as a soup garnish, a border for an entree, or a breakfast dish in its own right. The doubled binding of one raw yolk and two hard-boiled ones has the cooked yolk adding body without the water that would loosen the mixture. British and North American landings were heavy enough through the century that potted and tinned lobster were common store-cupboard items, and a recipe like this one assumes the cook has a whole shellfish to pick over.