Home › To Cook Game › One Yolk of Egg (Dessertspoonful of Cream)
One Yolk of Egg (Dessertspoonful of Cream)
A dessertspoonful of Cream.
One tablespoonful of cooked Spinach.
Pound these ingredients well in a mortar, pass them through a wire sieve, season with a little salt, pepper, nutmeg, and chopped parsley.
Take some Nouilles paste, roll it out very thin, cut it in broad strips about an inch wide.
Arrange small heaps of the forcemeat in rows on the paste, wet all round with a brush. Lay a second strip or band over the garnished one.
Press between the little heaps. Stamp them out with a small round cutter. Boil them in salted water for five minutes or more, gently. Drain on a cloth, and serve in consommé.
This is a stuffed-pasta garnish for clear soup: a spinach and egg-yolk forcemeat sealed between two sheets of noodle dough, poached, and dropped into consommé at the last moment. The title has swallowed the first line of the ingredient list — the recipe begins with one egg yolk.
- The missing first ingredientThe heading is the opening of the ingredient list, so the filling is one egg yolk, a dessertspoonful of cream and a tablespoonful of cooked spinach. Read the title as part of the recipe or the proportions make no sense.
- Spoon measuresA dessertspoonful is two teaspoons, roughly 10 ml; take the tablespoon as the ordinary British one, about 15 ml, though period spoon measures were not standardised. The whole filling therefore amounts to only a couple of tablespoons — enough, at a guess, for a dozen small rounds, or a garnish for a few bowls of soup.
- Nouilles pasteFrench for noodle dough. The book gives no formula; any standard fresh egg-pasta dough — flour, egg, a little salt — will stand in, rested before rolling and taken to the thinnest setting on a machine to answer the book's "very thin."
- Mortar and sievePounding and then passing through a wire sieve was the usual way to get a smooth green purée. A small food processor followed by a tamis or fine sieve does the same work; the sieving still matters, since stringy spinach shows up badly in a clear broth.
- Squeeze the spinachCooked spinach holds a great deal of water, and a wet filling will burst the seam or cloud the consommé. Wring it hard in a cloth before pounding, and the yolk and cream will bind it.
- Sealing and cuttingBrush water round the heaps, lay the second band over, and press down firmly between them before stamping with a small round cutter — necessarily under an inch, since the bands are only about an inch wide. Pressing out trapped air helps keep them from opening in the pot.
- PoachingFive minutes or more at a bare shiver, not a rolling boil — hence the "gently." Salted water only, as directed; boiling them in the consommé itself would leave it starchy and dull.
- ServingDrain on a cloth, then slip them into hot, well-clarified consommé just before it goes to table. A few per bowl is enough; more turns a clear soup into a pasta course.
Filled noodle rounds served in clear soup were a fixture of the professional kitchen, where a consommé was judged first on its clarity and second on the neatness of whatever floated in it. The French word nouilles — borrowed in turn from the German Nudel — was standard in English kitchen French, and books of this class kept it untranslated. The technique described, laying filling in rows between two thin bands of paste and stamping out sealed rounds, is essentially that of ravioli. Spinach bound with egg yolk and cream, pounded and sieved to a smooth purée, was one of the standard coloured forcemeats used to give visual interest to an otherwise transparent soup.