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Panada for Fish Forcemeat
Put the third of a pint of water into a moderate-sized saucepan, with an ounce of fresh butter and a pinch of salt. Let it boil, then sprinkle in gradually four ounces of fine flour; stir until the panada is smooth and stiff, then add the unbeaten yolks of three eggs. Spread the panada on a plate, and when cold it is ready for use. Time, about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 4d.
This is a binder, not a dish: a stiff flour-and-water paste that gets pounded into fish flesh to make quenelles and forcemeat. It behaves like choux dough made without the full complement of eggs.
- The measurementsAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so a third of a pint is about 6 2/3 fl oz, roughly 190 ml or about four-fifths of a US cup. Four ounces of flour is roughly 115 g — weigh it if you can, since the whole point is a paste of predictable stiffness.
- "Fine flour"Plain white flour, sifted. Victorian flour was softer than modern strong bread flour; ordinary all-purpose is the closest match, and low gluten development is an advantage here.
- Add the flour off the boilSprinkling flour into water at a rolling boil invites lumps. Pull the pan from the heat, add the flour in one go, beat hard with a wooden spoon, then return it to low heat and work it until the paste leaves the sides of the pan clean and no longer smells raw — two or three minutes.
- The hinge: cool before the yolksThe recipe adds the yolks straight after the paste stiffens, but yolks stirred into paste still at full heat can set into grains of scrambled egg. Safer to let it drop to hand-hot first, then beat them in one at a time. The mixture should stay stiff enough to hold a ridge.
- Spread it thinSpreading on a plate is not tidiness but cooling strategy — a thick lump holds heat and sweats. A thin layer, covered once cold, keeps a day in the refrigerator.
- TimingThe quarter of an hour covers cooking only. Reckon another 30 to 45 minutes for it to go properly cold, which it must be before it meets pounded fish.
- Yield and proportionThis makes about 12 oz of panada. Proportions of panada to raw fish flesh vary a good deal from source to source, from roughly equal weights down to a third or less for a finer result; start light on the panada and adjust.
- CostFourpence is Cassell's estimate of the ingredient cost: the butter, flour and eggs.
Panada comes from the Latin panis, bread, and originally meant just that: bread soaked in stock or milk, used to stretch and soften a forcemeat. By the nineteenth century a cooked flour paste of this kind was widely used alongside the bread version in professional kitchens, and was held to give a smoother, springier result when pounded with fish and passed through a sieve. It is a component rather than a dish, one of the standard preparations a cook was expected to have ready before attempting quenelles, fish puddings or the moulded forcemeat borders that decorated a Victorian entrée. The mixture is essentially pâte à choux short of its full egg, and the family resemblance is not accidental — both belong to the same tradition of flour paste cooked in a pan.