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One Truffle (Gill of White Sauce)
One gill of White Sauce.
Cut the chicken into very small pieces. Chop up the mushrooms, truffles, and ham, and stir into the white sauce. Butter well nine small moulds; line them neatly with the quenelle meat, not leaving a particle uncoated; fill in with the minced chicken; coat them neatly over the top with the quenelle meat. Steam them for twenty minutes; dish in a circle on spinach or mashed potatoes; pour good white sauce over and round, and serve peas or mixed vegetables in the centre.
This is the finishing half of a chicken quenelle recipe — the ingredient list sat above it in the original book, and the page begins mid-list with the truffle and the sauce. Read it as a set of instructions for lining small moulds with forcemeat and steaming them.
- The gillA British imperial gill is 5 fl oz, a shade over half a cup; American books of the same era use 4 fl oz. Either quantity is right for binding the mince — you want the filling moist and holding together, not pourable.
- Quenelle meatNot a shaped dumpling here but the raw forcemeat itself: pounded chicken or veal worked with a panada of bread or flour, egg white and cream, then sieved. A food processor does in two minutes what the original cook did with a mortar and a drum sieve. Keep everything cold or the emulsion breaks.
- The moulds"Nine small moulds" is all the recipe gives; dariole or timbale moulds of roughly 2 to 3 fl oz would suit. Small ramekins work. Butter them heavily and, if you like, line the base with a disc of buttered paper — the lining layer is thin and tears on turning out.
- Line without gaps"Not leaving a particle uncoated" is the hinge of the dish. Any bare metal lets the filling stick and the timbale collapses when unmoulded. Press the forcemeat up the sides with the back of a wet teaspoon to an even quarter-inch.
- SteamingTwenty minutes suits 2 fl oz moulds; cover each with buttered paper or foil so condensation does not waterlog the tops. The centre should read 165F. Larger moulds need proportionally longer, and overcooking squeezes the cream out of the forcemeat and leaves it grainy.
- The truffleTruffle is a costly ingredient now, and its appearance here alongside mushroom and ham signals a well-provisioned kitchen; note the instructions say "truffles" while the heading gives one. A few dried and rehydrated morels or a teaspoon of truffle paste stirred into the sauce gives the aromatic note; truffle oil is a different, harsher thing.
- Resting before turning outLet the moulds stand two or three minutes off the heat before inverting. Straight from the steamer the forcemeat is fragile; a short rest firms it enough to hold its shape on the spinach.
- YieldNine moulds, so a first course for eight or nine, or a light main for four with the vegetables in the centre of the ring.
The timbale of chicken quenelle is the kind of dish associated with service à la russe, where dishes arrived in sequence and a small, precisely moulded entrée was expected to look as considered as it tasted. Much of it reads as professional kitchen practice: the forcemeat pounded and sieved by hand, the identical small moulds, the ring arrangement with a vegetable garnish in the middle, and the white sauce — a velouté or béchamel — poured over and round rather than served separately. Truffle, mushroom and ham as a trio for enriching a pale forcemeat is common in the French repertoire, and British cookery writers drew on it.