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Turtle Soup, Forcemeat Quenelles For
Take a quarter of a pound of bread-crumbs, soak them in milk for a short time, and afterwards wring them in a cloth to squeeze the moisture from them. Take a quarter of a pound of lean veal from the fillet, scrape it into pieces with a knife, pound it in a marble mortar till it is quite smooth, and rub it through a sieve. Mix it with the bread-crumbs, and add half an ounce of butter, a salt-spoonful of salt, a pinch of cayenne, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, and half a nutmeg grated. Pound these ingredients together till they are thoroughly mixed and quite smooth, then add the yolks of three eggs boiled hard and the yolks of two raw eggs. Dredge a little flour on the table, and roll out the preparation. Make it into balls the size of a small nutmeg, throw these into boiling water slightly salted, and let them boil till they are hard. Drain them on a sieve, and put them into the soup a few minutes before serving. They are supposed to represent the eggs of the turtle. Time to boil, six minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. for this quantity. Sufficient, one forcemeat ball for each guest.
A veal panada forcemeat, shaped into small balls meant to mimic turtle eggs floating in the soup. The method is straightforward once the pounding is handed to a machine.
- The hinge: pound it truly smoothThe texture of a quenelle depends entirely on the veal being reduced to a paste with no fibre left. A food processor does in two minutes what the marble mortar and sieve did in twenty; scrape down, pulse again, and only then work in the panada and eggs.
- Quarter of a pound4 oz, about 115 g, of both breadcrumbs and veal. Use plain dry or day-old crumbs rather than modern dried breadcrumb granules, which soak up milk unevenly.
- Wring the crumbs hardThe squeezed panada should be barely damp. Wet crumbs give a slack mixture that spreads in the poaching water instead of holding a ball.
- Half a nutmegThat is roughly a teaspoon of grated nutmeg for 8 oz of mixture, which reads as heavy-handed now. A quarter-teaspoon suits most modern palates; nutmeg is used freely in veal forcemeats of this period.
- Salt-spoonfulA salt-spoon is about a quarter teaspoon. Season lightly here, since the balls finish in an already seasoned soup.
- Boil till they are hardTake that as poach, not boil. A rolling boil batters the quenelles apart; hold the water at a bare shiver and give them the stated six minutes, by which point a ball the size of a small nutmeg (roughly 2 cm) will be cooked through.
- Yield and holdingThis quantity makes a considerable number of small balls, well beyond a modest table at the specified one per guest, so scale down if you are cooking for a few. They can be poached ahead, cooled, and dropped into the hot soup a few minutes before serving, as directed.
- Probable cost1s. 2d. is pre-decimal British currency, fourteen old pence, and is useful only as a period price signal. Veal fillet is now the expensive part of the recipe by a wide margin.
Real turtle soup, made from green turtle imported live from the West Indies, was one of the great luxury dishes of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century English table, served at civic banquets and Lord Mayor's dinners; the whole apparatus of mock turtle soup, made from a calf's head, grew up to imitate it more cheaply. These little veal forcemeat balls belong to that theatre of imitation: the note that "they are supposed to represent the eggs of the turtle" is the point of them, since a genuine turtle could carry unlaid eggs that were prized in the tureen and a cook working without them was expected to supply a substitute. The technique - a panada of soaked bread, scraped and pounded lean meat, hard and raw yolks to bind - is the general forcemeat of the period, adaptable to garnishing almost any clear soup. Green turtles are now protected and the parent dish has effectively disappeared; the quenelle outlived what it was invented to flatter.