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Consomme with Quenelles
Prepare some small quenelles in a buttered stew pan, pour salted water over them, and poach for two minutes. Drain on a sieve, put in a tureen with one quart of boiling consomme over them, and serve.
This is an assembly note rather than a full recipe: Oscar assumes the reader can already make a quenelle forcemeat, and the whole point is the contrast between clear hot broth and pale, delicate dumplings. Two things carry the dish — the size of the quenelles and the temperature of the poaching water.
- The quenelle mixtureNot given here; a quenelle forcemeat of the period was raw chicken breast, veal or pike pounded to a paste with egg white, seasoning and cream, sometimes lightened with panade (a paste of bread or flour cooked in milk). A modern equivalent is a food-processor mousseline of about 8 oz boneless chicken breast, 1 egg white and 4-6 oz heavy cream, kept ice-cold throughout or the cream will break out of the emulsion.
- "Small" means smallTwo minutes only cooks a quenelle the size of a hazelnut or a small teaspoon of paste. Anything bigger will still be raw inside at that point. Shape with two teaspoons dipped in hot water, or pipe short lengths from a plain tube and cut them off.
- Poach below the boilThe recipe does not say how hot the water should be, only that it is salted. Modern practice is to hold it at about 170-180F, barely trembling, since a hard boil tends to tear mousseline quenelles apart and makes them spongy. Salt the water lightly — roughly a teaspoon per quart — since the consommé brings its own seasoning.
- The buttered stew panA "stew pan" is a wide, shallow, straight-sided pan, and buttering it stops the quenelles sticking as they set. Arrange them in a single layer, then pour the hot water down the side of the pan rather than over the top of them.
- Drain properlyPoaching water is bland and will dull the consommé. Lift the quenelles out with a slotted spoon onto a sieve or a cloth and let them drain for a minute before they go into the tureen.
- The consomméOne quart is the working unit here. It must be genuinely clear and served very hot, close to boiling, because the cool quenelles and the cold tureen will pull the temperature down. Warm the tureen first.
- YieldA quart of consommé with quenelles serves four as a first course, five or six in small cups. Allow four to six little quenelles per portion — enough to be a garnish, not a stew.
Quenelle is generally traced to the German Knödel, a dumpling, and by the nineteenth century it meant something far more refined than its ancestor: a pounded forcemeat of fish or white meat bound with egg and cream, poached and used to garnish soups, to line timbale moulds or to be sauced on its own. Escoffier and his contemporaries treated quenelles as a test of a cook's hand, since the paste has to be worked cold and seasoned by taste alone. Their appearance in Oscar Tschirky's book probably reflects how a hotel kitchen of the 1890s worked: consommé was presumably made in quantity every day, and the menu's variety came from the garnish dropped into it at the last minute — quenelles one night, royale, profiteroles, vermicelli or a julienne of vegetables the next. That may well be why the entry is three sentences long. The forcemeat and the stockpot were already standing in the kitchen; all that remained was the assembly.