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Quenelle Soup
Into a cupful of boiling water put a piece of butter the size of a walnut, add a pinch of salt, and stir in sufficient flour to make a rather thick, smooth paste. Turn it out and set away to cool.
Cut into small pieces a 1/2 pound of nice lean veal, and pound them thoroughly in a mortar, adding, a little at a time, 2 ounces of the cold paste and 3 ounces of butter; beat these well together and add the beaten yolks of 2 eggs and the white of 1, and season well with salt and pepper and grated nutmeg. Rub the whole through a fine sieve; add a little thick cream, and with 2 teaspoons form it into quenelles, or small balls. Place these in the bottom of a saucepan, pour over them carefully enough boiling stock to cover them, and cook gently a few minutes. Pour into a hot tureen the required amount of hot soup or broth, add the quenelles and the stock in which they were boiled, and serve.
This is a classic veal forcemeat quenelle, built on a flour-and-butter panade and poached in stock at the last minute. The mortar work can be handed to a food processor, but the temperature of the poaching liquid is what decides whether the quenelles hold together.
- Never let the stock boilOnce the quenelles go in, the liquid should sit at a bare shiver, around 170-180F, with no visible bubbling. A rolling boil tears the egg-bound forcemeat apart and leaves shreds in cloudy stock.
- Butter the size of a walnutSomewhere between one and two tablespoons, roughly 15-30 g. The recipe gives no flour quantity, only 'sufficient flour' for a rather thick, smooth paste; a cupful of water will take somewhere in the region of three-quarters to a full cup before it comes together.
- Mortar workA food processor does this in two minutes: pulse the diced veal to a paste, then add the cold panade and the softened butter in pieces. Keep everything cold, and stop as soon as it is smooth, or the fat separates.
- The sieve is not optionalPressing the mixture through a fine sieve or drum sieve removes sinew and gives quenelles their characteristic silky texture. If you have used a processor, a stiff rubber spatula and a medium-mesh sieve will do it.
- Cream, added by feel"A little thick cream" means heavy cream, added a tablespoon at a time until the paste is soft enough to shape between two spoons but still holds a shape. Poach one test quenelle before shaping the rest; if it collapses, beat in a little more of the panade.
- Shaping with two teaspoonsDip the spoons in the hot stock, scoop, and pass the mixture from one spoon to the other to form a smooth oval. They are sometimes piped instead, which is faster and gives an even size.
- Cooking timeThe recipe says a few minutes; teaspoon-sized quenelles need only about 3 to 5, and they firm up and float. Much longer and the veal tightens and goes spongy.
- YieldHalf a pound of veal makes roughly 30 to 40 small quenelles, enough to garnish six to eight cups of clear soup at four or five per bowl. They can be poached ahead and held in a little warm stock.
Quenelles reached English-language cookbooks straight from French professional kitchens, where a quenelle is a poached dumpling of pounded meat or fish bound with a panade and enriched with butter and egg. The word is generally traced to the German Knödel, dumpling, arriving through Alsace. In a book like this one, quenelles appear as a garnish rather than a dish: a clear broth was expected to carry something in it, and a spoonful of pale, delicate veal forcemeat was the mark of a well-run kitchen because it demanded a mortar, a sieve and someone with the arm to use them. Veal was the standard choice for its mild flavour and pale colour; the same method with pike became the celebrated quenelles de brochet of Lyon.