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Quenelles as a Garnish for Poultry
The following is a pretty and appetising dish for dinner or supper. Stuff a large fowl with veal forcemeat, and roast it. Keep out a small quantity of the forcemeat, and make it up into quenelles, about the size of small walnuts. Poach these in gravy, and warm with them as many slices of tongue as there are quenelles. Put a border of mashed potatoes round a large dish, and place on this, alternately, the tongue and the quenelles. Put the roast fowl in the middle of the dish, and pour over it and the quenelles a quart of good white stock. Serve very hot. The appearance of the slices of tongue will be further improved if they are brushed over with a little glaze.
A composed roast-fowl platter of the late Victorian dinner table, assembled from three separate preparations. Nothing here is difficult, but the timing matters more than any single step.
- Poach the quenelles gentlyThis is the hinge of the dish. A veal forcemeat bound with egg should poach in liquid held at a bare shiver, around 175F, never at a boil. A rolling liquid tears the quenelles apart and squeezes them tough; walnut-sized ones will want roughly 8-10 minutes.
- A large fowlA modern 4-5 lb roasting chicken stands in directly; roast at 375F for about 20 minutes per pound, allowing extra because it is stuffed, and check that the thickest part of the thigh reaches 165F.
- Veal forcemeatA veal forcemeat of this period is lean veal pounded to a paste and bound with egg. Ground veal worked in a food processor with a little cream gives a similar result in a fraction of the time. Reserve a small quantity of it before stuffing the bird, as the recipe directs -- enough to roll into the quenelles you need.
- TongueCured, pressed ox tongue was a familiar larder item in this period, whether cooked at home or bought ready-dressed, and served cold in thin slices. Delicatessen tongue is the obvious substitute; failing that, thin slices of a good cured ham will give the same pink contrast, though not the same texture.
- GlazeGlaze here is meat stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold, brushed on warm for shine. Reduce a cup of strong brown stock to two or three tablespoons; commercial demi-glace concentrate works as well.
- A quart of stock is too much as pouredA full quart over the platter will flood the potato border and drown the mash. Reduce good white stock (veal or chicken, unbrowned) by half, thicken it lightly if you like, and pour a little over the quenelles, sending the rest to table in a boat.
- The potato borderMashed potato stiffened with egg yolk holds its shape; pipe it through a large star tube around the rim and brown it under the grill before the garnish goes on, or it will slump under the hot stock.
- YieldWith the fowl, forcemeat and potato, this serves six to eight as a main course. Count on two quenelles and two slices of tongue per person when deciding how much forcemeat to hold back.
The quenelle -- a poached dumpling of pounded meat or fish bound with panada and egg -- came into English cookery from France. By the time Cassell's Dictionary appeared, quenelles were a standard mark of a properly dressed dish: they signalled that a kitchen had someone willing to pound veal in a mortar and sieve it. The entry is really a lesson in dressing -- how to turn a plain roast fowl into a platter fit for a dinner table by ringing it with contrasting colours, the pink of tongue against the pale forcemeat against a piped white border. Building a dish inside a wall of piped potato was a familiar device of the period, and it survived in hotel dining rooms into the twentieth century.