Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Entrees › Chicken Quenelles
Chicken Quenelles
1 chicken breast 1/2 calf's brains 1/4 cup cream 2 tablespoons bread crumbs 2 tablespoons butter 1 egg 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice Grate of nutmeg Few grains pepper Clean the brains, tie in a piece of cheese cloth and cook slowly for half an hour in well seasoned stock. Cool and pound smooth, add to the chicken meat, also chopped and pounded, and rub both through a sieve. Cook the bread and cream together until a smooth panada; add the meat and seasonings and, lastly, the egg, and set away to cool. When ready to use dip two teaspoons in hot water, fill one spoon with the mixture and slip from one to the other until it is smooth and shaped like the bowl of the spoon; slide on a buttered pan. When all are formed, cover with boiling stock and let cook below the boiling point for ten minutes, keeping the dish covered with buttered paper.
The technique here — a pounded forcemeat bound with panada and poached in stock — is standard classical practice, but the ingredient list puts this dish out of reach. The following explains what fails and what the older vocabulary means.
- Calf's brains are the problemBovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk materials: they are the tissues that carry the infectious agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. There is no way to prepare them that removes the risk.
- Cooking does not helpThe half hour in stock and the ten-minute poach would be enough for bacteria but are irrelevant here. The agent is a misfolded protein, not a microbe, and it survives ordinary cooking temperatures and far beyond.
- You will not find the ingredient anywayYou may have trouble finding the ingredient -- Since the early 2000s, brain and other specified risk materials from cattle have been restricted from the human food supply in the US, the UK and the EU, though the rules are keyed to the age of the animal (30 months and over in the US, over 12 months in the UK and EU). Brains from younger calves are not banned everywhere, but availability is limited and varies by jurisdiction.
- Make a different recipeChicken quenelles exist in plenty of current forms that use only poultry, cream and egg. Use one of those rather than adapting this text.
- PanadaThe word means a bread- (or flour-) and-liquid paste cooked to a smooth thick binder — here breadcrumbs and cream. It is the binder that helps a pounded forcemeat hold together when poached.
- Quenelle shapingThe two-spoon method described, dipping the spoons in hot water and passing the mixture between them, is still how quenelles and other soft mixtures are formed. The buttered paper laid over the poaching dish keeps the tops from drying and skinning.
- Poaching below the boil'Below the boiling point' is deliberate: a rolling boil breaks up the delicate bind. The instruction means a bare simmer, well short of boiling, but the text gives no temperature.
Quenelles came into English cookery straight from the French repertoire, where a quenelle is a poached dumpling of pounded meat or fish lightened with panada and egg — the ancestor of the mousseline forcemeats still taught in classical kitchens. Mixing poultry with a proportion of brains or sweetbreads is often said to have been a nineteenth-century way to get a pale, exceptionally fine, almost custard-like texture at a time when there were no food processors and everything was worked through a mortar and a sieve by hand. Offal of this sort appears to have been no curiosity in 1900, turning up in household manuals alongside sweetbread patties and calf's-head soup. The dish reads as unremarkable period cookery, and it was the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s and the regulations that followed that moved bovine nervous tissue out of the domestic kitchen.