Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Pike Forcemeat
Pike Forcemeat
Cut off the fillets of a cold boiled pike, rub them through a fine hair-sieve, weigh them, and to every pound of fish, add ten ounces of bread-panada and ten ounces of butter; mix well, season with salt and pepper, stir in two beaten eggs and moisten with reduced lean veloute sauce thickened with egg. When of the proper consistency for forcemeat, it is ready for use.
This is a base preparation rather than a finished dish — a quenelle-and-stuffing mixture built on cooked fish, panada and butter in fixed proportions. The proportions are the whole recipe, so weigh everything.
- The hinge: test before you commitPoach a teaspoon of the mixture in barely simmering salted water for two or three minutes before using the batch. If it falls apart it needs more egg or a firmer panada; if it is rubbery and dense it needs more of the velouté. Oscar's "proper consistency" means it holds a soft shape on a spoon but is not stiff.
- Bread-panadaA paste of stale white crumb (crusts removed) cooked with milk or stock until it pulls away from the pan in one mass, then cooled. Ten ounces per pound of fish is a lot of panada by modern taste; it is what makes the forcemeat light rather than pasty, but you can reduce it toward six or seven ounces for a firmer, more fish-forward result.
- Hair-sieveA fine horsehair drum sieve; hair was generally preferred for delicate pur hat metal could discolour or taint them. A food processor plus a pass through a fine-mesh sieve or tamis gives the same texture in a fraction of the time; the sieving step is not optional if you want it smooth.
- Reduced lean velouté thickened with egg"Lean" means made with fish or vegetable stock rather than meat. Reduce it until quite thick, then finish off the heat with an egg yolk; add it cold, a spoonful at a time. Warm sauce will melt the butter and break the mixture.
- Butter temperatureTen ounces of butter per pound of fish must be soft and creamed, not melted. Keep the fish purée cold and work the butter in as you would for a mousseline, or the emulsion separates when poached.
- The pikeNorthern pike is a bony fish and rarely sold whole at supermarkets; walleye, pickerel or any firm white fish works in the same ratios. Pin-bone obsessively — pike bones are fine, forked and easy to miss in a purée.
- Yield and useA pound of fish with its panada, butter and sauce gives roughly two and a half pounds of forcemeat: enough to stuff a large whole fish, or to shape thirty to forty small quenelles for garnishing soup or a fish stew. Poach quenelles in water or stock held at 170-180F, never at a boil.
- KeepingUse it the day it is made, or within twenty-four hours refrigerated. It is a cooked-fish preparation carrying raw egg and a lot of dairy.
Forcemeat — from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of the older English "farced meat" — was the backbone of the professional kitchen Oscar Tschirky worked in, and a book like this one lists the base preparations a cook was expected to have on hand rather than as dishes in their own right. Fish forcemeats of this kind supplied quenelles for garnishing soups and filets de sole, and stuffings for whole braised fish, and pike was the classic choice: its flesh is lean and firm and binds well, which is why quenelles de brochet became associated above all with Lyon and stayed on French menus long after pike disappeared from most American fish markets. The recipe uses cold boiled fish rather than raw flesh.