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Quenelles for White and Clear Soups
Melt an ounce of butter in a stewpan over a gentle fire. Beat it up with a little flour and some thick cream, as much as will make a smooth paste. Add two ounces of boiled macaroni, two ounces of grated Parmesan, and a little salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg. Beat the mixture over the fire until it is smooth and firm, and leaves the sides of the saucepan with the spoon. Mould it into quenelles with a tea-spoon which has been dipped in hot water, and poach these in boiling gravy till they are done through. Lift them out with a skimmer, and put them into the tureen with the soup. Time, three minutes to poach the quenelles. Sufficient for a small tureen of soup.
A meatless garnish quenelle — closer to a stiff cheese panade than to the pounded veal or chicken forcemeat the word usually implies. It comes together in a few minutes, but the paste has to be genuinely stiff or the dumplings will dissolve in the soup.
- The hinge: cook the paste dryBeat over the heat until the mass pulls cleanly from the pan sides and holds a shape on the spoon. A paste that still slumps will disperse in the liquid; if in doubt, poach one as a test before shaping the rest.
- "Boiling gravy" means stock, at a bare simmer"Boiling gravy" means stock -- Gravy in Victorian usage generally means strong brown or white stock, not a thickened sauce. The recipe says boiling, but in practice a gentle simmer with the surface barely moving treats these more kindly; a hard rolling boil will break them apart. Three minutes is the recipe's own time for teaspoon-sized quenelles.
- Poach separately from the soupUse a shallow pan of stock kept aside for the purpose. Poaching in the finished consommé clouds it with starch and cheese, which defeats the point of a clear soup.
- Chop the macaroni"Two ounces of boiled macaroni" is ambiguous as to whether the weight is taken before or after boiling; either reading gives a workable quantity. Cut it into short pieces or a rough mince, or the tubes make the quenelles awkward to mould smoothly.
- QuantitiesOne ounce butter is 2 tablespoons; the flour is unstated but roughly an equal weight, about 3 tablespoons, will give a proper roux. Add the cream a little at a time — "as much as will make a smooth paste" is likely 3 to 4 tablespoons, no more.
- ParmesanTwo ounces grated is roughly half to two-thirds of a cup of Parmigiano-Reggiano or a firm grana, depending how finely it is grated. Salt lightly at the end: the cheese and the stock both carry salt.
- Yield and servingThe recipe claims only "sufficient for a small tureen of soup"; expect a couple of dozen teaspoon-sized quenelles at most. Shape with a teaspoon dipped in hot water, lift out with a skimmer, and add to the tureen at the last moment so they do not sit and soften.
Quenelle comes into English from French cookery in the nineteenth century, and it meant a pounded forcemeat of veal, chicken or fish bound with panada and egg, moulded between two spoons and poached as a garnish for soup or as an entrée in its own right. It was less a dish than a component, one of the small standardised garnishes a cook was expected to have in hand for dressing up a clear or white soup. This one substitutes macaroni and Parmesan for the meat, a cheap and quick variant of the same technique — the flour-butter-cream base is essentially the panada that binds the classic version. Named garnishes of this sort were the backbone of the elaborate service the book's readers aspired to, where a plain consommé was expected to arrive carrying something.