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Salmon Quenelles
Take four ounces of uncooked salmon, cut it up, and pound it with one ounce of butter. Pound three ounces of panada, add a table-spoonful of bechamel sauce, and mix them both in with the salmon. Pound again, putting in the yolks of two raw eggs and the white of one, and seasoning gradually with salt, white pepper, grated nutmeg, cayenne, and a few drops of essence of anchovy. Rub all through a sieve, and keep till wanted. To cook, make the quenelles of any desired shapes and sizes with a spoon or mould; have ready a pan slightly buttered, put them in; pour in boiling water to just cover the contents, let it boil water to just cover the contents, let it boil up again, then draw the pan aside, and leave it to simmer only until the quenelles are firm. Small ones will take from four to six minutes, large ones eight to ten. Probable cost, 1s.
A classic forcemeat: raw fish, panada and egg, lightened by pounding and set by gentle poaching. Almost everything that can go wrong happens in the last five minutes, at the stove.
- Never let the water boilDraw the pan aside -- The instruction to draw the pan aside is the hinge of the recipe: the water is brought up to the boil once, then pulled back to a bare simmer until the quenelles are just firm. Held at a rolling boil they are apt to break apart or turn spongy.
- PanadaA thick binding paste, not a modern breading: usually flour and butter cooked with milk or water to a stiff paste, or bread soaked in milk and dried out over heat. Three ounces is about 85 g, and it is best cooled before it meets the fish, or the mixture may loosen.
- Pounding, without a mortarThe repeated pounding is emulsification. A food processor does it in under a minute: pulse the chilled salmon with the butter, add the panada and bechamel, then the eggs, keeping everything cold so the mixture stays firm rather than greasy.
- Rubbing through a sieveThis step catches pin bones and sinew and gives the smooth texture that defines a quenelle. Worth doing even after a processor ⿑ push the paste through a drum sieve or fine mesh with a plastic scraper.
- Essence of anchovyA Victorian bottled seasoning, salty and slightly sweet. Anchovy paste or a mashed salted anchovy fillet stands in; a few drops means a few drops, since it is there for depth rather than flavour you can name.
- QuantitiesFour ounces of salmon is 115 g, one ounce of butter 30 g. As written this is a small batch, yielding roughly a dozen teaspoon-sized quenelles as a garnish for soup, or four to six large ones as a first course.
- Test one firstPoach a single small quenelle before shaping the rest. If it collapses, work in a little more panada or a spoonful of beaten white; if it is rubbery, slacken with a little more bechamel.
- ShapingTwo dessert spoons dipped in hot water give the traditional smooth oval; the recipe also allows a mould. Butter the pan as instructed and lay them in with room between, or they may fuse as they swell.
Quenelles came into English kitchens with French professional cookery in the nineteenth century, the name generally traced to the German Knödel, dumpling. The forcemeat is a technique rather than a single dish: master the ratio of flesh to panada to egg and the same method yields chicken, veal, rabbit or fish quenelles, to be floated in clear soup, banked around an entrée or served in a sauce as a light course of their own. The "probable cost, 1s." is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced its recipes for the middle-class household.