Pate a Choux
2 1/2 tablespoons milk 1/8 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon lard 1/4 cup flour 1/2 teaspoon butter 1 egg Heat butter, lard, and milk to boiling-point, add flour and salt, and stir vigorously. Remove from fire, add egg unbeaten, and stir until well mixed. Cool, and drop small pieces from tip of teaspoon into deep fat. Fry until brown and crisp, and drain on brown paper.
Fish Force-meat I 1/4 cups fine stale bread crumbs 1 egg 1/4 cup milk 2/3 cup raw fish Salt Cook bread and milk to a paste, add egg well beaten, and fish pounded and forced through a puree strainer. Season with salt. A meat chopper is of great assistance in making force-meats, as raw fish or meat may be easily forced through it. Bass, halibut, or pickerel are the best fish to use for force-meat. Force-meat is often shaped into small balls.
These are two soup garnishes: tiny fried choux puffs to float in a clear soup, and fish force-meat balls to poach in it. Both are small-batch by design, and both depend on getting the paste right before anything is shaped.
- The hinge: cook the paste, then cool itThe hinge: cook the paste, then add the egg off the heat -- Beat the flour into the boiling milk and fat and stir vigorously, then take the pan off the fire before the unbeaten egg goes in; the recipe cools the finished paste afterwards, before shaping. Letting the paste stand a moment off the heat first keeps the egg from setting in threads.
- Quantities are minuteA quarter cup of flour and one egg gives roughly 15 to 20 pea-sized puffs, enough to garnish four bowls of consomme. Weigh the flour at about 30 g if you want consistency at this scale, since a quarter cup scooped heavily will stiffen the paste past dropping cleanly from a teaspoon.
- LardThe half teaspoon of lard alongside the butter can simply be another half teaspoon of butter, or any neutral solid fat. At this quantity it makes little difference.
- Deep fat temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; frying of this kind is generally done at around 360 to 375F. Below that the puffs soak; above it they colour before the interior sets and collapse as they cool. Drop them from the teaspoon and give them room, as they swell considerably.
- DrainingBrown paper was the standard drainer of the period. Use paper towels or a rack, and serve within minutes, as fried choux softens quickly.
- Force-meat textureA food processor does in seconds what the original achieves by pounding and pressing through a puree strainer. Pulse the poached bread paste, egg and raw fish together until smooth; overworking a lean white fish makes it rubbery rather than tender.
- Cooking the fish ballsThe force-meat is raw as mixed and must be cooked before serving. Shape into small balls and poach in gently simmering stock or salted water until firm and opaque through, about 4 to 6 minutes for balls the size of a hazelnut.
- Fish choiceBass, halibut and pickerel are all firm, lean, mild fish that bind well. Cod, haddock or pike behave the same way. Oily fish such as salmon or mackerel will dominate a clear soup.
Pate a choux appears in the soup chapter rather than among the pastries because, in cookery of this period, the paste was as much a garnish as a dessert base: fried in tiny beads it became choux frits or profiteroles for floating on consomme, in the same family as the fried croutons, custard dice and quenelles that a well-set table expected in a clear soup. Force-meat, from the French farce, is the same idea taken further, a pounded forcemeat of raw fish and panade shaped into balls and poached, the domestic descendant of the restaurant quenelle. The note that a meat chopper is of great assistance dates the book neatly: the hand-cranked grinder was becoming common in American kitchens around the turn of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the day were quick to point out that it spared the cook a long session with a mortar and a puree sieve.