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Salt (Cook bread and milk to a paste)
Cook bread and milk to a paste, add egg well beaten, and fish pounded and forced through a purée strainer. Season with salt. A meat chopper is of great assistance in making force-meats, as raw fish or meat may be easily forced through
This is a fragment of a fish forcemeat (fish balls or quenelles) meant to be dropped into one of the milk-based soups in this chapter. No quantities are given, so it has to be read as a method rather than a formula.
- What is actually being madeBread cooked to a paste in milk is a panada, the classic binder for forcemeat. Fish, egg and panada are combined, shaped, and poached; the excerpt as given stops before any shaping or cooking instruction.
- No quantities are givenThe original supplies none, and inventing them would be guesswork. A workable starting ratio for this style of forcemeat is roughly equal weights of raw fish and panada with one egg per half pound of fish, but that is a modern reconstruction, not what the book says.
- Panada consistencyCook the bread and milk over low heat, stirring, until the mass leaves the sides of the pan in one lump. If it is loose, the forcemeat will not hold; if it is dry, the quenelles turn tough.
- "Meat chopper" means a grinderA hand-cranked meat grinder clamped to the table, not a knife. A food processor does the same work in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, and keep the fish very cold so the mixture does not break.
- The puree strainerPressing pounded raw fish through a fine sieve removes pin bones, skin fragments and connective tissue. With a processor this matters less, but a tamis or drum sieve still gives a noticeably finer texture and is the difference between a quenelle and a fish ball.
- Choice of fishLean white fish behave best here: haddock, cod, pike, whiting, sole. Oily fish such as salmon or mackerel make a heavy, strongly flavoured forcemeat that overwhelms a delicate milk soup.
- Cooking the shaped forcemeatPoach at a bare shiver, around 170-180F, never a rolling boil, which tears the quenelles apart. Small spoon-shaped pieces take three to five minutes and should be cooked through to an opaque centre before serving.
- Season before you shapeThe instruction to season with salt is the whole seasoning in the original. Poach a teaspoon of the mixture as a test dumpling, taste it, and adjust salt, pepper, nutmeg or lemon before committing the batch.
Forcemeat -- from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of the older English "farce meat" -- was one way of turning fish and meat into something that could be served in genteel company, though pounded quenelles were as often a luxury preparation as a thrifty one. The bread-and-milk panada was the workhorse binder of nineteenth-century cookery, doing the job that egg white and cream do in a modern mousseline. Its placement in a chapter of soups without stock is telling: those are the milk and cream soups made without the long-simmered meat foundation that a household with servants could keep going all week, and a few poached fish quenelles were what lifted such a soup from thin to substantial. The aside about the meat chopper is also of its moment. Hand-cranked grinders were reaching ordinary kitchens, and a machine could spare the cook the mortar and pestle work that pounded forcemeat had always required.