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QUENELLES OF GAME (another way)
Pick the meat from the remains of cold game, and carefully remove the skin, bone, and sinew. Cut it small, and put half a pound of it into a mortar, with a tea-spoonful of flour, an ounce of butter, half an ounce of fat bacon, and a little salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg. Pound the mixture to a smooth paste, and bind it together with the unbeaten yolk of an egg. Mould into balls in the usual way, and boil these gently in a little gravy till they are done through. Drain, and serve piled high on a hot dish, with mushroom sauce poured round them. Time to boil, about a quarter of an hour.
A use-up-the-leftovers version of a classic forcemeat: unlike true raw-flesh quenelles, this one starts from already-cooked game, so the pounding and the egg yolk are doing all the binding work.
- The hinge: keep the liquid below a simmerThe hinge: keep the liquid at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil -- the recipe's "boil gently" means barely moving water. A hard boil bursts these quenelles, since cooked meat and a single yolk give a fragile bind. Poach one alone first to test; if it breaks up, work another teaspoon of flour or a little fresh breadcrumb into the paste.
- Mortar or processorA food processor does the pounding in 30-60 seconds, but pulse rather than run it, and stop while the paste still has a little grain. Overworked cooked game turns pasty and dense. Keep the meat and butter cold going in.
- WeightsHalf a pound of picked meat is about 225 g, roughly what two partridges will yield; a pheasant will usually give rather more than that. An ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; half an ounce of fat bacon is about 15 g, which should come from the fatty end of a piece of unsmoked streaky or salt pork rather than a lean modern rasher.
- "Mould into balls in the usual way"The recipe asks for balls, and the two-spoon quenelle method (scoop with one wet spoon, smooth and turn out with the other) was one common way of shaping. Pieces about 1 inch across will heat through within the stated time.
- TimingA quarter of an hour is generous for meat that is already cooked; 1-inch quenelles are hot through in about 8-10 minutes at a bare simmer. Longer poaching only tightens the egg and squeezes out moisture.
- The gravy"A little gravy" means enough well-flavoured game or brown stock to float them, not to submerge them deeply. Strain and reduce that poaching liquid afterwards and use it as the base of the mushroom sauce; it carries most of the flavour.
- YieldHalf a pound of meat gives 12-16 small quenelles, enough for three or four people as a light course or as a garnish for a game soup or a ragout.
Quenelles came into English kitchens from French professional cookery, where the word is generally traced to the German Kn del, a dumpling; the classic form is raw flesh pounded with panada and butter, forced through a sieve, and poached. This version is the household variant, printed in a dictionary that assumed a large joint or a brace of birds would come to table more than once: the first appearance was roast, the second was quenelles, potted meat or croquettes. Cassell's belongs to the late nineteenth-century wave of encyclopaedic domestic manuals sold to middle-class households with a cook but no French training, which is why the entry hands over a professional term and then explains it in plainly domestic steps.