Home › The Principles of Cookery › Forcemeat for Quenelles
Forcemeat for Quenelles
This forcemeat may be composed of chicken, veal, game, or fish. Scrape the meat from a couple of rabbits, or the lean meat from a knuckle of veal, pound it in a mortar, and pass it through a wire sieve. Put back into the mortar three-quarters of a pound of meat, with half a pound of good butter, and the same of milk panada; mix, and pound all together. Add to it a flavouring of pepper, salt, nutmeg, and lemon-peel, both grated, and continue to pound while adding four or five well-beaten eggs. Much depends on the care employed in the preparation of this forcemeat; it may be used as a stuffing, or moulded into quenelles.
A classic French-style forcemeat in Victorian dress: pounded lean meat, butter, and panada bound with egg. The proportions are the recipe; everything else is technique.
- Milk panadaAn unexplained assumption in the original. It is stale white breadcrumbs simmered in milk to a stiff, smooth paste, then cooled — roughly 4 oz crumbs to half a pint of milk, cooked down and beaten until it leaves the side of the pan. It must be cold before it goes into the mortar or the butter will melt and the mixture will split.
- The ratioThree-quarters of a pound of meat, half a pound of butter, half a pound of panada, four or five eggs. That is a very rich forcemeat by modern standards, and the butter and egg can be reduced if a lighter result is wanted.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in under a minute, but sieve the pounded meat as directed before you add anything else — rabbit and veal both carry sinew that no blade will break down, and a single thread of it will show in a poached quenelle. Push through a drum sieve or fine mesh with a plastic scraper.
- Keep it coldThe hinge of the whole thing. Chill the meat, the butter, the panada and the bowl. A processor warms the mixture fast; work in short pulses and return it to the refrigerator if it starts to look greasy or loose.
- Test before you commitPoach a teaspoonful in barely simmering salted water for two minutes and taste it. This is the only way to check seasoning (raw forcemeat cannot be tasted) and to see whether the mixture holds. If it breaks up, beat in another egg white; if it is heavy, slacken with a spoonful of cold cream.
- Poaching quenellesShape between two wetted dessertspoons and slide into water or light stock held at 170–180F — a bare shiver, never a boil. Boiling water tears them apart. Three to five minutes depending on size; they roll over and firm when done.
- Lemon-peelGrated zest only, no white pith, and use it sparingly — a Victorian "flavouring" of lemon and nutmeg in a delicate white forcemeat means a hint, not a note you can name.
- YieldOver two pounds of forcemeat once the eggs are counted in: enough for a substantial quantity of quenelles, or for stuffing a large bird.
The quenelle is French cuisine naturalised into the English kitchen, and it is a building block — the same paste serves as soup garnish, as stuffing for boned poultry, as a lining for timbales. The word is generally traced to the Alsatian German Knödel, a dumpling, which is what a quenelle is, refined to the point of weightlessness. The panada — bread or flour cooked in liquid — is the old binder that predates the modern reliance on cream, though it never wholly gave way to it: by the middle of the twentieth century the fashionable quenelle was a mousseline made with cream and no starch at all, but the starch-bound version carried on alongside it. The instruction to scrape the meat from a couple of rabbits is a reminder that this was a way of getting elegance out of cheap or awkward carcasses, the pounding and sieving doing work that a butcher's better cut would have made unnecessary.