Home › The Principles of Cookery › Quenelles, German
Quenelles, German
Put a quarter of a pound of butter into a saucepan, with three small cupfuls of milk. When the liquor rises in the pan, stir six ounces of flour quickly into it, add a little salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and stir the paste briskly till it leaves the sides of the saucepan with the spoon. Turn it out, and add gradually three whole eggs and a little grated Parmesan. Mould the quenelles in the usual way, and let them simmer gently until they are done through. The water or gravy in which these quenelles are poached should not be allowed to boil at all, or the balls will break. Time to simmer, according to size. Probable cost, 10d. for this quantity.
This is choux paste by another name: a milk-and-butter panada cooked out on the stove, enriched with eggs and cheese, then poached rather than baked. Everything depends on the temperature of the poaching liquid.
- Never let the liquid boilThe original warns against it explicitly and it is the hinge of the dish. Hold the water or stock at 170-180F, barely shivering, with no rolling bubbles; a boil will tear the quenelles apart. Poach one test quenelle before committing the batch.
- "Three small cupfuls" is vagueVictorian cup measures were not standardised, and "small" makes it worse. Judge by consistency instead: the paste is right when it pulls cleanly away from the pan sides in a single mass. Around 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups of milk to 6 oz flour is one workable modern ratio.
- Weights in modern termsA quarter pound of butter is 4 oz / 115 g; six ounces of flour is roughly 1 1/3 cups scooped and levelled. Weighing the flour matters here, since too much gives a heavy, bready dumpling.
- Cool before the eggs"Add gradually three whole eggs" means off the heat and after a few minutes' cooling, one egg at a time, beaten in fully before the next. Eggs added to a scalding paste will scramble in streaks.
- Moulding "in the usual way"A common period technique is two wet tablespoons, passing the paste from one to the other to form a three-sided oval. Dipping the spoons in the hot poaching liquid between quenelles keeps the paste from sticking.
- Timing by sizeThe book declines to give a time because the quenelles vary. Tablespoon-sized ones take 8-10 minutes at a bare simmer; they float and firm to a gentle springiness when done. Cut one open to check the centre is set rather than pasty.
- Poaching in gravyIf you poach in stock or gravy rather than water, the liquid picks up starch and cheese and thickens usefully; keep it and serve it as the sauce. Salted water alone gives a plainer result that wants a butter or tomato sauce alongside.
- Yield and servingThis quantity makes roughly 24 tablespoon-sized quenelles, enough for four to six as a first course or a garnish for soup. They are best served straight from the poaching liquid; reheating tends to toughen them.
- The cost note"Probable cost, 10d." is pre-decimal British currency, ten pence in a shilling-and-pence system, and is the book's standard estimate of what the ingredients would cost.
Quenelles are French in name and technique, from a forcemeat bound with panada and poached in liquid. This version dispenses with the pounded veal, chicken or fish of the classic quenelle and leans instead on a plain flour-and-egg paste with cheese, closer to the dumpling traditions of Central Europe than to the kitchens of Careme, though the book does not explain what it means by "German". The paste itself is the same one that becomes profiteroles and gougeres in the oven, and its appearance here in a savoury poached form is a reminder that choux was long treated as a general-purpose binding paste rather than a pastry. The dictionary was compiled for late-Victorian middle-class households, and a quenelle that requires no mortar, no sieve and no expensive meat was exactly the sort of borrowing that made continental cookery look attainable at ten pence a batch.