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VEAL QUENELLES (another way)
Take the fleshy part of veal, cut it into slices, and scrape it with a knife till you have got off all the meat without the sinews. About half a pound of this rasped meat is sufficient for a dish. Boil a calf's udder, either in your stock-pot or in plain water. When it is done and has become cold, trim all the upper part, cut it into small pieces, and pound them in a mortar till they can be rubbed through a sieve. All that part which has thus been strained through the sieve make into a ball of the same size as the meat, which should be also rolled into a ball; then make a panada (see PANADA). You must have three balls, one of udder, one of meat, and one of panada.
This is a component recipe rather than a finished dish: Cassell's expects you to combine the three balls, season, bind with egg, shape and poach, and it sends you elsewhere for the panada. What follows fills in the gaps and deals with the one ingredient no longer sold.
- Calf's udder is the sticking pointBoiled and sieved udder was the standard fat element in nineteenth-century French forcemeat, prized because it emulsifies smoothly and stays tender. It is effectively unobtainable outside specialist butchery; the usual modern stand-in is an equal weight of chilled fresh pork fatback, or well-chilled unsalted butter, worked in at the pounding stage.
- Equal thirds by volumeEqual thirds -- The whole method rests on the three balls being the same size: one meat, one fat, one panada. Half a pound of scraped veal therefore means roughly the same bulk again of each of the other two, though equal size is not the same as equal weight.
- PanadaA panada is a stiff paste of bread or flour cooked with milk or stock until it leaves the sides of the pan, then cooled; the recipe sends you to its own PANADA entry for the method. It should be completely cold before it goes into the mortar, or the mixture will slacken.
- Scraping versus grindingScraping with a knife across the grain leaves the sinew behind, which is the entire point. A food processor does the same work in seconds provided you first trim every scrap of silverskin and gristle by hand; any sinew that gets through will show as tough threads.
- Keep everything coldThis is a fat-and-protein emulsion. Chill the veal, the fat and the bowl, and stop pounding as soon as the paste is homogeneous, or the fat will separate and weep out during cooking.
- Poach, never boilShaped quenelles go into salted water or light stock held at about 175F, barely trembling. A rolling boil bursts them. Six to eight minutes for a dessertspoon-sized quenelle; they are done when they float and feel springy.
- Test before you shape the lotPoach one small quenelle first. If it falls apart, work in a little more panada or an egg white; if it is heavy and rubbery, more fat or a spoonful of cream.
Quenelles belong to the elaborate French garnish repertoire that English cookery books absorbed wholesale in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the word itself is generally traced to the German Knödel, a dumpling, by way of Alsace and Lorraine. The forcemeat was regarded as a foundation skill: once a cook could balance flesh, fat and panada in equal parts, the same formula produced quenelles of chicken, game, rabbit or pike. The calf's udder is the detail that dates the page most sharply. It was sold and used in Victorian and Edwardian kitchens, valued for a bland, meltingly soft fat that carried no pork flavour into delicate white forcemeats, and it seems to have faded from British butchers' counters over the twentieth century as offal buying narrowed to a handful of familiar cuts.