Panada
INGREDIENTS.-1½ pint of white stock, 1 slice of lean ham, 1 lb.of butter, 2 penny rolls, a little minced parsley, 2 shalots, 2 or 3 cloves, 2 blades of mace, a few mushrooms, 2 eggs, salt, pepper, a little milk.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Take the crumb from the rolls, and soak it in milk for 1/21 an hour, then take it out and squeeze out the moisture, Put the soaked bread into a stewpan with one-third of the stock, and set on one side. Put into a separate stewpan 1 oz. of butter, the ham cut small, and the mushrooms and other seasonings, and fry all gently over a slow fire. Next moisten them with the remainder of the stock, boil for 20 minutes, and strain into the other stewpan over the soaked bread.
Place the pan over the fire and keep constantly stirring, to prevent burning, and, when the mixture dries, put in the 1/2 oz. of butter and let this also dry up; then add the yolks of the eggs and mix well. Put the panada on a plate to cool, and use it with the udder and the veal or other meat used for quenelles or French forcemeat.
PANCAKES.
A panada is not a dish in itself but a binding paste — bread soaked, cooked down with stock and enriched with egg yolk — used to lighten quenelles and forcemeats. The whole success of it lies in cooking the mixture until it is dry enough to leave the side of the pan cleanly.
- The hinge: cook it dryThe paste must be stirred constantly over heat until it dries, as the recipe directs, and dried again after the butter goes in. A panada left wet will bind forcemeat poorly and give slack quenelles.
- Butter quantitiesThe ingredient list calls for a pound of butter, but the method uses only 1 oz for frying the ham and seasonings and a further 1/2 oz stirred in at the end. Follow the method; roughly 1 1/2 oz (45 g) total is right for a pint of stock.
- Penny rollsTwo small plain white rolls, crumb only, crusts discarded. Any lean white bread will do; avoid sourdough or anything heavily flavoured, as the panada is meant to be neutral.
- White stockAn unroasted veal or chicken stock, pale and lightly gelatinous. A pint is 20 fl oz in British measure, about 2 1/2 cups. Use a low-salt stock, since the mixture reduces considerably.
- Shalots and other spellingsShalots are shallots. Blades of mace are the dried outer casing of nutmeg, sold whole in strips; keep the spices whole here, since the seasonings are strained out before the paste is finished.
- Soaking timeThe crumb wants about half an hour in milk, then a firm squeeze to remove as much liquid as the bread will give up.
- UdderCow's udder was used as a fat in Victorian quenelle forcemeats and is rarely, if ever, sold in Britain or the United States today. Modern quenelle recipes use butter, cream or a little pork fat in its place.
Panada takes its name from the Italian and Spanish pan, bread, and in its oldest form was simply bread boiled in water or broth — invalid food, fed to the sick and to infants well into the nineteenth century. The version here belongs to the other branch of the word, the professional French kitchen's panade: a stiff bread-and-stock paste used as a liaison to hold chopped meat or fish together in quenelles and forcemeats without making them heavy. Its appearance in Mrs Beeton reflects how thoroughly French technique had been absorbed into English upper-middle-class cookery by the later Victorian period, when a household aspiring to serve quenelles needed the same foundation preparations a restaurant kitchen used. The costing of 1s. 6d. marks it as a component of an ambitious meal rather than everyday work.