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Herb and Forcemeat Quenelles
Mix together in equal quantities some celery, parsley, chervil and green onions with a little tarragon and double their united bulk in spinach leaves. The latter should be washed in a number of waters to remove the grit. Place the herbs in a saucepan with boiling water enough to cover and boil for a few minutes. When soft drain, put them in a bowl of cold salted water, strain through a fine hair-sieve and chop them fine. Make about two-thirds of their quantity of fowl or veal forcemeat, season it well and mix with the herbs. Form the mixture into small egg-shaped quenelles using two teaspoons for the purpose, and dipping them into warm water each time. Throw the quenelles into a saucepan of boiling salted water and boil until firm. Drain them and serve in a soup tureen with any kind of soup.
A classic soup garnish: blanched green herbs folded into a fine meat forcemeat, shaped between two spoons and poached. The method is sound, but two words in the text carry more weight than the rest.
- Poach, do not boil"Throw the quenelles into a saucepan of boiling salted water and boil until firm" will break them apart. Bring the water to a boil, then drop the heat so the surface only shivers at around 175-180F, and slide the quenelles in. Small ones are firm in 6-8 minutes.
- ForcemeatHere it means raw fowl or veal pounded smooth and well seasoned, not the bread-and-sage stuffing the word suggests today. Period quenelle forcemeats were bound in several ways — panada, suet, egg, cream — and the text does not say which. If cream is used, work the mixture cold, over ice if the room is warm, or it will break.
- Test one firstPoach a single quenelle before shaping the rest. It is the only way to check both seasoning and binding; if it disintegrates the mixture needs more egg white, if it is rubbery it has been overworked.
- Hair-sieveA fine sieve of woven horsehair, standard equipment in a professional kitchen of the period. Any fine-mesh strainer or a chinois does the same job. The instruction is really about pressing every drop of water from the greens — wet herbs will thin the forcemeat.
- Chervil and tarragonChervil is the one ingredient here most likely to defeat a shopper; it wilts fast and is rarely stocked. A mix of parsley with a little extra tarragon and some fresh dill approximates it. Tarragon dominates quickly, so keep it to the "little" the text specifies.
- Green onionsScallions, not spring onion bulbs. Use the green tops and the white, and blanch them with the rest so their bite softens.
- ProportionsThe herbs are measured by bulk before blanching, and greens collapse to a fraction of their raw volume. The recipe fixes only ratios: spinach at twice the combined bulk of the herbs, and forcemeat at about two-thirds the quantity of the chopped greens.
- Yield and serviceTwo teaspoons shape the small egg-shaped quenelles the text asks for. Hold them in warm salted water or lightly buttered stock, and add them to the tureen at the last moment.
Quenelle came into French from the Alsatian dialect form of German Knödel, a dumpling, and the technique is generally traced to Lyon, where quenelles de brochet — pike forcemeat poached in the same way — remain a regional signature. By the late nineteenth century the quenelle had become a fixed part of the classical repertoire less as a dish than as a garnish: something to give body and a bit of elegance to an otherwise transparent consommé, shaped to order in the kitchen and dropped into the tureen as it went out. The green version here is stiff with blanched herbs and spinach, spinach being the component that attaches the word "florentine" to a dish in French kitchen usage. Oscar Tschirky, who was maître d'hôtel rather than chef at the Waldorf, put his name to the book in which this entry appears.