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Queen Charlotte's Pudding
Take two oranges and one lemon, grate the peels and mix with the juice, into which put four ounces of sugar and the yolks of five eggs. Then make a little paste for the bottom of the dish, into which pour the mixture. Bake it slowly in a moderate oven.
THE QUEEN'S CHICKEN SOUP (the queen being Marguerite of Valois).-See Chicken. QUENELLE is one of the many words of the French kitchen which Frenchmen-learned and simple-have given up as inscrutable. It is the name for the most delicate forcemeat, which the French cooks prepare sometimes from chickens, sometimes from whitings, sometimes from game-but originally from young rabbits. Quenelle is a doublet of the old French name for a young rabbit-connil, a little cony and it is formed from the Latin cuniculus, in the same way as the French name for a distaff, Quenouille, is formed from conucula, a corruption of the Latin colucula. Quenelle of rabbit, therefore, is a pleonasm meaning a little cony of rabbit; and quenelle of chicken is an absurdity, meaning a little cony of chicken.
Mince, pound, and pass through a sieve, say half a pound of rabbit's flesh, -final weight after the sieve. With this mix and pound a little more than half the quantity of boiled udder of veal, which has been treated in the same way; say five ounces. To this again add the same quantity of panada as of udder. Pound all well together, seasoned with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and softened with the yolks of two eggs and a tablespoonful of white sauce or of cream. Before this quenelle is put aside for use it should Quince be tested. Poach a tiny bit of it, and if it should come too stiff, moisten the quenelle with another spoonful of white broth or else cream. If udder of veal should fail, fresh butter may be used instead in the same proportionseight ounces of pounded rabbit, five of fresh butter, and five of panada.
Chicken, game, and fish prepared in the same way are also called little conies or Quenelles. The Quenelles of whiting are in great favour; but it is to be noted that in Quenelles of fish there is never any veal udder,-the combination is always fish, butter, and panada, finished off as before.
QUINCE has gone out of fashion; and it is natural that when the best fruits of the tropics are brought to our shores quickly in ships, we should neglect some of those grown at home. It is to be desired, however, that apple-pie should never go out of fashion; and quinces have this curious virtue: that, being of little value themselvesnot nearly so good as apples-they improve an apple-pie beyond the power of words to describe.
Quinces for addition to apple-pie. - Peel them and cut them in quarters. To five pounds of fruit put three of sugar and a wineglassful of water. Put them in pint jars, cover them, place them in boiling water, and simmer them very gently for three hours. Put the peels in with them, and take them out when done. What is not wanted at once can be bottled.
Rabbits
An orange-and-lemon curd baked in a pastry case, given in the telegraphic style of a dictionary entry rather than a working recipe. The quantities are sound; almost everything else has to be supplied.
- The hinge: keep the heat lowThis is five yolks and citrus juice with no starch and no butter to stabilise it, so it is a baked custard in all but name. The instruction to bake it slowly matters more than the word moderate — go for 325F rather than 350F, and pull it when the centre still trembles.
- "A moderate oven"In Victorian usage that is roughly 350F. For a yolk-only citrus filling the lower end is safer; the curd sets at about 170F internally and will curdle and weep if pushed much past that.
- Quantities in modern termsFour ounces of sugar is about half a cup (115 g). Two oranges and a lemon yield roughly two-thirds of a cup of juice, depending on the fruit; the original expects you to judge, and a little more or less will not break it.
- Grating the peelsTake only the coloured zest of the two oranges and the lemon; the white pith beneath is bitter.
- "A little paste"Plain shortcrust, rolled thin, lining a shallow 8-inch dish or tart tin. Blind-bake it before the filling goes in — a wet custard poured into raw pastry gives a soggy base, and the low bake will not dry it out.
- What is missingThere is no butter and no whole eggs, so the set is firm and the flavour sharp. Many contemporaneous orange puddings add two to four ounces of butter; if you want the softer curd texture of a modern lemon tart, that is where it comes from.
- YieldAn 8-inch tart, six modest servings. Best eaten the day it is made, at room temperature.
- On the quince note that followsThe quince passage on the same page tells you to bottle what is not wanted at once. It gives no jar sterilising and no headspace, and the three hours in boiling water it does specify is not a tested modern process. Use a current tested recipe if you want to preserve quinces; the fruit itself, simmered with sugar and added to an apple pie, is worth the trouble.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877), written anonymously by the journalist E. S. Dallas and named for Auguste Kettner's Soho restaurant, is arranged as an alphabetical dictionary, which is why a pudding, a soup cross-reference, an etymological digression on quenelles and a note on quinces all share a page. Puddings named for Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, appear in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the attributions are generally traditional rather than documented, a way of dignifying a dish rather than recording its origin. The thing itself is older than the name: baked orange puddings, thickened with yolks alone and set in a pastry case, appear in English receipt books from the early 1700s.