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Two Eggs (One gill of Brown Sauce)
One gill of Brown Sauce.
Two ounces of fat Bacon.
Pepper, Salt, a little Nutmeg.
A teaspoonful of chopped Mushrooms.
One ounce of Butter.
Two ounces of Flour.
When all this is made into quenelle meat and passed through a wire sieve, butter some small moulds, fill them in with the quenelle meat and steam them twenty minutes.
This is a terse, notebook-style entry: the title carries two of the ingredients (the eggs) and the method assumes you already know how a quenelle forcemeat is put together. Read it as a panada-based forcemeat steamed in small moulds.
- The gillAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, about 140 ml; an American gill is 4 fl oz. Either way, half a cup of brown sauce is close enough for this quantity of forcemeat.
- What the method actually isWhat the method probably is -- The recipe does not describe it, but on the usual pattern: melt the butter, stir in the flour and the brown sauce and cook it to a thick paste — a panada — then work in the finely chopped or pounded bacon, the mushrooms, the seasoning and the two eggs of the title. The fine pounding and sieving is what gives quenelle meat its texture; a food processor followed by a push through a fine sieve does the same work in a fraction of the time.
- Fat baconThis means unsmoked fatty streaky bacon or fresh pork fat, not a lean modern rasher. Green (unsmoked) streaky or salt pork is the nearest thing; smoked bacon will dominate the nutmeg and mushroom.
- The mouldsSmall dariole or timbale moulds, buttered and ideally lined at the base with a disc of buttered paper. Fill them about three-quarters full — the mixture rises a little — and cover each with buttered paper or foil so condensation does not sit on top.
- SteamingTwenty minutes at a gentle steam is right for moulds of roughly 60–75 ml. A larger mould needs longer; the test is a skewer that comes out clean and a mixture that has just set and shrunk from the sides. Hard boiling water makes the forcemeat coarse and full of holes.
- Consistency checkBefore filling the moulds, poach a teaspoonful in simmering water. If it falls apart, work in a little more panada; if it is rubbery and tight, loosen with a spoonful of cream. This is the one step that decides whether the finished quenelles are light or leaden.
- Yield and servingThe quantity should fill something like half a dozen small moulds — an entrée for two or three, or a garnish for a larger dish. Turn them out and serve with more brown sauce, or set them around a ragout of mushrooms.
Quenelles are generally traced into English high-class cookery from the French professional kitchen, where a forcemeat bound with a flour-and-liquid panada and pushed through a sieve was one of the standard tests of a cook's hand. Recipes of this kind fill the entr yee chapters of late Victorian and Edwardian manuals because an entr yee was expected to be something shaped, moulded and sauced rather than simply roasted, and small steamed moulds could be turned out in numbers to match a long menu. The extreme brevity here is characteristic of books that seem to assume a good deal of prior skill in the reader: the writer names the proportions and trusts the reader to know that pounding, sieving and a bain-marie stand behind the words "quenelle meat." The labour is the real story — before mechanical processors, that sieve was worked with a wooden spoon or a pestle, and the smoothness of the result was a matter of arm and patience.