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Fish Quenelles
salt, pepper, cayenne + cup cream Chop fish and press through a sieve. Add unbeaten white of egg and cream beaten until stiff; add seasonings, and poach in boiling water.
This mixture may be rolled in balls or shaped in teaspoons.
The text as printed is a fragment — the fish, the number of egg whites and the exact cream measure have been lost with the head of the ingredient list. What survives is enough to work from, since the method is the standard one, but treat the quantities below as reconstruction rather than transcription.
- The missing quantitiesThe line "+ cup cream" is almost certainly a broken fraction, most likely ½ cup, but it cannot be recovered from this page. A workable classic ratio is 1 lb skinless white fish, 2 egg whites and ½ to ¾ cup heavy cream; anything more precise would be invention.
- Keep everything coldThis is the hinge. The fish, the bowl, the blade and the cream should all be refrigerator-cold, and the mixture should go back into the cold between stages. Warm forcemeat breaks, and a broken quenelle disintegrates in the poaching water.
- Sieve or processor"Chop fish and press through a sieve" means working the chopped fish through a sieve, and period kitchens often pounded it in a mortar first. A food processor does the same work in a minute; pulse the cold fish with the salt to a paste, then add the whites. Passing the finished paste through a fine sieve still improves the texture.
- Whipped cream, foldedThe cream is beaten stiff and folded in, not poured in liquid. That is what gives the old-style quenelle its lightness. Fold with a spatula until just homogeneous; overworking deflates it.
- Do not use boiling waterDo not use a hard boil -- the recipe says "boiling water", but quenelles are best dropped into water that has been brought to the boil and then pulled back. Poach at 170–180F, with barely a tremor on the surface. A rolling boil will shred them.
- Test one firstPoach a single teaspoonful before shaping the rest. If it falls apart, the mixture needs more egg white; if it is rubbery or dense, more cream. Taste it too — raw seasoning always reads flatter than the cooked result.
- ShapingTwo wetted teaspoons, passed between each other, give the traditional three-sided oval. Slide each one straight into the water. Rolled balls are easier and hold as well.
- Yield and servingThe yield cannot be fixed from the page, since the quantities are missing; a pound of fish will give several dozen teaspoon-sized quenelles. Quenelles of this period were commonly served in a white or shrimp sauce, floated in a clear fish broth, or used as a garnish for a poached whole fish.
The quenelle is a French dish with a German name: the word is generally traced to Knödel, dumpling, and the technique took its classic form in Lyon, where quenelles de brochet — pike pounded with panada, egg and cream — remain a regional signature. Pike is bony enough that pounding and sieving is the practical way to eat it, and the method transferred easily to any lean white fish. This version has dropped the panada, relying on egg white and whipped cream alone, which is part of why it reads so short. Lowney's, a Boston chocolate firm, issued its cook book as a general household volume, not merely a confectionery pamphlet, so a fish forcemeat sits quite naturally alongside the cocoa.