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Salt, Pepper and Nutmeg (Skin a large whiting remove)
Skin a large whiting, remove the flesh from the bone, put it into a mortar with two ounces of butter and four ounces of panada made of one ounce of butter, two ounces of flour and one gill of stock; pound these well together, rub them through a hair sieve, put them back in the mortar, and work in by degrees a tablespoonful of stiff cold Béchamel sauce, one whole egg and the yolks of two eggs. Season with pepper, salt and grated nutmeg.
Andouillettes de Volaille en Caisse à la Française. (Small Sausages of Chicken Forcemeat.) Ingredients.
Four ounces of cooked Chicken (freed from skin and bone).
This is not a finished dish but a farce fine de poisson — the fish forcemeat that becomes quenelles, fish sausages, borders and stuffings. The page break has swept in the opening lines of the next recipe, for chicken andouillettes; ignore them, they belong to a separate entry.
- The hinge: keep everything coldThe mixture holds together because cold butter, panada and egg emulsify with the fish protein. Chill the fish, the butter and the panada, and work in short bursts; if the paste warms and looks greasy or separated it will break apart in the poaching water.
- A gillIn British usage a quarter-pint: 5 imperial fl oz, about 142 ml (an American gill is the smaller 4 fl oz, about 120 ml). Here it is the liquid for the panada, so accuracy matters more than usual.
- PanadaA thick flour-and-butter paste cooked with stock, essentially a very stiff white roux-based binder. Melt the ounce of butter, stir in the two ounces of flour, add the gill of stock and beat over heat until it forms a smooth ball that leaves the pan clean, then spread it out and cool it completely. The recipe calls for 4 oz of panada; these quantities make rather more than that, so weigh out what you need.
- WhitingA lean, mild, low-fat white fish that purées cleanly. A large one gives perhaps 8-10 oz of skinned, boned flesh. Pollock, haddock, hake or cod fillet all work; avoid oily fish, which will not set as a pale forcemeat.
- Mortar and hair sieveA food processor does both jobs. Pulse the fish, butter and panada to a smooth paste, then push it through a fine drum or nylon sieve with a plastic scraper to catch sinew — a modern stainless sieve will do; hair was the standard fine sieve material of the period, and was also reckoned less likely than metal to taint or discolour a pale paste.
- BéchamelA tablespoon of stiff, fully chilled béchamel, thick enough to hold its shape on the spoon. Its purpose is flavour and richness, not liquid; a slack sauce will loosen the farce.
- EggsOne whole egg plus two yolks into this quantity is a lot of binding. Add them a little at a time and stop if the paste starts to slacken past a thick piping consistency.
- Test before committingPoach a teaspoon of the mixture in barely simmering salted water or stock for two or three minutes, then taste and check the set. Adjust salt, pepper and nutmeg on the strength of that rather than the raw paste.
- Cooking and yieldShape with two spoons or pipe into a buttered pan, cover with hot but not boiling stock or salted water at about 175F/80C, and poach 8-10 minutes until firm and just springy. Boiling makes quenelles coarse and porous. Expect about 1 lb of forcemeat, enough for four as a first course.
Fish forcemeat of this kind is a piece of high Victorian and Edwardian professional kitchen grammar, inherited more or less intact from French practice: pounded flesh, a cooked flour panada, butter and egg, sieved to velvet smoothness. It underpinned quenelles de brochet, fish borders, timbales and the small moulded garnishes that filled out the fish course of a long menu, and its whole point was refinement — the mortar and the hair sieve exist to remove every trace of fibre and to keep the paste pale. Whiting was often chosen in British kitchens because it was cheap, abundant on the North Sea and Channel coasts, and lean enough to make a white, neutral base that took on whatever sauce it was served with. The surrounding recipe for andouillettes de volaille en caisse applies the farce principle to chicken, which is how such books were organised: learn the farce, then vary the flesh and the mould.