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Quenelles, Ragout Of
Take half a pound of any kind of dressed meat, game, or poultry. Cut it small, and pound it in a mortar. Mix with it its weight in bread-crumbs, and add a salt-spoonful of chopped parsley, a salt-spoonful of thin lemon-rind, cut very small, half an anchovy, boned and pounded, a little salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg, and half a clove of garlic, if liked. Pound these ingredients thoroughly. Mix them up with an ounce of clarified butter, and when cool, bind the mixture together with the yolk of an egg. Make it into balls the size of a walnut; fry these in hot fat, drain them, put them on a hot dish, and pour over them a rich brown gravy. If liked, the quenelles may be poached in boiling water instead of being fried in fat, and white sauce, in which a few mushrooms have been boiled, can be poured on. The juice of a lemon should be squeezed over before the sauce is poured upon them. Time to poach or fry the quenelles, five to ten minutes, or until they are firm. Probable cost, exclusive of the gravy, 1s. Sufficient for a small dish.
This is a leftovers recipe dressed up in French clothing: cooked meat, pounded with an equal weight of crumbs and bound with egg. A few of the measures and one of the cooking instructions need adjusting.
- "Dressed meat" means cookedDressed here simply means already cooked — roast beef, the last of a chicken, braised game. Raw meat will not behave the same way, as the crumb-to-meat ratio assumes the meat has already shed its moisture.
- A salt-spoonfulThe salt-spoon was the small spoon in a Victorian salt cellar, roughly a quarter of a teaspoon. So about 1/4 tsp chopped parsley and the same of finely shredded lemon zest.
- Breadcrumbs by weightHalf a pound of meat to half a pound of crumbs is a large proportion, and it only works with fresh soft crumbs, which weigh far less per cup than dry ones. If you use packaged dry crumbs the mixture will be stodgy; start with half the weight and add more only if it will not hold a shape.
- Mortar to processorA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but pulse rather than run it — the mixture should be a coarse paste with some texture, not a purée.
- Clarified butterAn ounce is 2 tablespoons. Clarified butter presumably keeps the water in whole butter from loosening the mixture; ghee is a close substitute, though it tastes nuttier.
- Half an anchovyOne salted or oil-packed fillet, or about half a teaspoon of anchovy paste. It is there for savour, not fish flavour, and its absence is noticeable.
- Poach at a bare simmerThe instruction to poach in "boiling water" is the one point to ignore. A rolling boil knocks these balls apart; hold the water at 175–185F, just trembling, and they will firm within the five to ten minutes the recipe allows.
- FryingFat at about 350–360F. Because everything inside is already cooked, you are only setting the egg and colouring the outside, so the book's five to ten minutes, or until firm, is a generous allowance.
- YieldBalls the size of a walnut give roughly 16 to 18 from this quantity, which serves three or four as a first course or a light dish, as the book's "small dish" suggests.
Quenelle is generally traced to the German Knödel, a dumpling, probably by way of Alsace, and in classic French kitchens it means a pounded forcemeat of veal, fish or poultry lightened with panada and egg and poached in careful oval shapes. What Cassell's gives here is the thrifty English cousin: not a fresh forcemeat at all but a way of using up Sunday's roast, bound with crumbs and butter and rolled into balls rather than moulded between spoons. That is characteristic of the late-Victorian household dictionary, which took the vocabulary of restaurant cookery and reattached it to the realities of a family kitchen with cold meat in the larder. The "probable cost, exclusive of the gravy, 1s." is part of the same instinct.