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.
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Lobster Quenelles
1 lobster 2 tablespoons bread crumbs 6 tablespoons butter 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Few grains cayenne 2 egg yolks 1 egg white Pound to a paste the meat and coral of a hen lobster, mix with it the bread crumbs and butter; add seasonings and moisten with eggs; if it proves too soft when tasted, add another white; if too stiff, work in a little water. Shape and poach, and serve with Tartare Sauce. (If served hot, the sauce should be Bechamel.) These may be cooled after poaching, fried in butter and served as a garnish for steamed fish, or in soup.
Chicken Croquettes, No. 1 2 cups of chopped cold fowl 1 cup White Sauce No. 3 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1/4 teaspoon onion juice 1 teaspoon chopped parsley Mix the meat and seasonings, combine with white sauce; cool, shape, crumb and fry in deep fat. Drain on soft paper.
Chicken Croquettes, No. 2, (with Brains) 2 chickens boiled 1 pair veal brains boiled 1 cup suet chopped 1 lemon, juice and one-half the rind grated 1/4 nutmeg grated Salt to taste 2 springs parsley 1 teaspoon onion juice Cayenne and white pepper 1 pint White Sauce No. 3 Chop or grind the meat as fine as possible, mix meat and seasoning well together and add as much thick white sauce as you dare; it should be very soft as it stiffens in cooling. Set on the ice until thoroughly cold and firm enough to shape easily. Roll in cork shape about one by two and one-half inches. Roll in sifted bread crumbs, then in beaten egg diluted with 2 tablespoons milk, then in crumbs again, and set away till needed. Fry as in the preceding recipes.
N. B.--The croquettes should be as soft as thick cream in the inside when served, with a delicate gold-colored covering outside.--Condensed from "Good Living" by Madame S.V.B. Brugiere.
Chicken Croquettes, No. 3 1 cup cold cooked chicken 1/2 can mushrooms or 6 large oysters 3 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 2 tablespoons butter 1/2 cup chicken stock 1/4 cup cream 1/4 cup mushroom liquor 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon lemon juice Chop the chicken and mushrooms fine. Melt the butter, add the flour, mixed with seasonings, and add slowly the stock and mushroom liquor. Cook until smooth and add the cream. Combine with the meat and mushrooms. Cool, shape and crumb. Fry in deep fat. Drain on brown paper.
This page runs four related forcemeat recipes together: lobster quenelles and three chicken croquettes. One of them, Chicken Croquettes No. 2, is built on boiled veal brains and cannot be made today; the notes below cover that first, then the rest of the page.
- The brains croquettesBovine brain and spinal cord are the tissues that carry the BSE agent, and no domestic cooking temperature destroys it. Sale of specified risk material from cattle is tightly restricted in the UK, EU and US, and though those rules are age-based and do not catch every calf carcass, the risk is one no adjustment to the recipe removes. Read it as a historical document; if you want croquettes, use Nos. 1 or 3 on the same page.
- Coral, and the hen lobsterThe coral is the unripe roe of a female lobster, black-green when raw and coral red once cooked. Modern lobsters are rarely sold sexed, and a male will give you no coral at all; without it the quenelles are pale and taste flatter, though they still work. One 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb lobster yields roughly a cup of meat.
- Pounding to a pasteA mortar was the original tool; a food processor does it in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, and keep the mixture cold. Warm lobster and warm butter separate, and the quenelle falls apart in the poaching water.
- Shape and poachShape between two wet tablespoons into ovals and slide them into salted water or fish stock held at a bare shiver, around 170-180F. A rolling boil breaks them. Eight to ten minutes, until they float and feel set; test one before committing the batch.
- White Sauce No. 3The numbered sauces are graded by thickness, and No. 3 is being used here as the croquette-binding grade; a binder of that kind runs to roughly 4 tablespoons each of butter and flour to a cup of milk or stock, thick enough to mound on a spoon. Too thin and the croquettes burst in the fat.
- Deep fat"Fry in deep fat" assumes a kitchen without a fat thermometer; the usual cue for a cooked mixture was a bread cube browning in about forty seconds. Use 375F, fry in small batches, and chill the shaped croquettes thoroughly first so the crumb crust sets before the interior loosens.
- Onion juice and canned mushroomsOnion juice is made by grating an onion and pressing the pulp through a sieve; a quarter teaspoon of grated onion is close enough. Half a can of mushrooms is only an ounce or two drained by modern can sizes, and the mushroom liquor called for is the canning liquid, so do not pour it away.
- DrainingBrown paper and "soft paper" mean paper towels now. Drain on a rack set over paper rather than directly on it, or the underside steams soft.
- YieldThe lobster quantity makes about eight quenelles, serving four as an entree course or two as a light main. No. 1 gives roughly eight to ten of the cork-shaped rolls and No. 3 rather fewer; No. 2, built on two whole chickens and a pint of sauce, makes several times that.
A quenelle is a poached forcemeat dumpling, the name generally traced to the German Knödel by way of Alsace and Lorraine, and by the late nineteenth century it was a fixture of the French professional repertoire that American hostesses were busy borrowing. The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book, issued by the Washburn-Crosby milling company to sell flour, is a fair snapshot of that borrowing: numbered white sauces, croquettes shaped like corks, an entree course expected between fish and roast. Croquettes in particular were the era's great use for cold cooked meat, and the standard of excellence, as the note here insists, was a crisp shell over an interior barely firmer than thick cream. The brains croquette came in from Madame S. V. B. Brugiere's Good Living, and its presence is a reminder that offal of every kind was ordinary household food before the second half of the twentieth century reclassified some of it as hazard.