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Chicken Force-meat II
1/2 breast raw chicken Pepper White 1 egg Slight grating nutmeg Salt Heavy cream Chop chicken finely, or force through a meat chopper. Pound in mortar, add gradually white of egg, and work until smooth; then add heavy cream slowly until of right consistency, which can only be determined by cooking a small ball in boiling salted water. Add seasonings, and rub through sieve.
This is a quenelle forcemeat: a smooth chicken mousseline poached in small balls or ovals as a soup garnish. The whole thing hinges on temperature and on the test ball.
- Test ball first, alwaysThe recipe is right that consistency "can only be determined by cooking a small ball in boiling salted water." Poach a teaspoonful in barely simmering salted water for two to three minutes: if it falls apart, add a little more egg white; if it is rubbery or dense, work in more cream.
- Keep everything coldChicken, egg white, cream, and bowl should all be refrigerator-cold, and the cream added a spoonful at a time. If the mixture warms up, the emulsion is liable to split and the cooked quenelle turns grainy and weeps liquid.
- Mortar to food processorA chilled food processor does in a minute or two what the mortar took considerably longer to do. Pulse the raw breast to a paste, add the egg white, then stream in cream with the machine running. Stop as soon as it is smooth.
- The sieve stepRubbing through a sieve removes sinew and gives the glassy texture the period expected. With a processor it is optional, but a fine drum sieve or tamis still makes a noticeably finer quenelle.
- QuantitiesHalf a raw breast is perhaps 4 oz of meat, though modern birds run larger. Figure on one egg white and 1/3 to 1/2 cup of heavy cream for that amount, added by feel rather than by measure. "Heavy cream" here means cream at 36 percent fat or above; half-and-half will not hold.
- Poaching, not boilingThe recipe says boiling salted water, but a bare tremble (roughly 170-180F) treats the paste better: a true boil tears the surface and toughens the outside before the centre sets. Shape with two wet teaspoons; two to four minutes depending on size, and they float and firm when done.
- Yield and useThe quantity makes a modest number of small quenelles, enough to garnish several bowls of clear soup if that is the use intended. Poach them separately and drop them into the hot soup at the last moment so the broth stays clear.
- SeasoningWhite pepper is specified, presumably so no dark flecks show in the pale forcemeat. Season a little more assertively than seems right; the cream mutes salt, and the test ball is your chance to taste and correct.
Forcemeat was one of the workhorses of the late-nineteenth-century kitchen, and the numbering of this recipe suggests a book or school that taught more than one grade of it. The fine cream version, what French kitchens call a mousseline, was a standard way to garnish a clear soup: quenelles, dumplings, or the linings of timbales and vol-au-vents, all built from the same paste. It belongs to a table where a clear consomme was expected to arrive carrying something small and pale and precisely shaped, and where a cook had a mortar, a pestle, and the arm for them. Much the same technique survives in professional kitchens; the pounding has been mechanised.