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Stuffed Chicken Quenelles
Place one ounce of gelatine in a basin, cover it with cold water, and soak it for an hour. Trim off all the skin from the flesh of a chicken, pick the meat from the bones, chop it fine, and pound in a mortar until it is smooth; then stir in with it one tablespoonful of chopped and pounded pork, and pass the whole through a fine sieve. Put one breakfast cupful each of stale breadcrumbs and milk in a small saucepan, and boil for ten minutes, stirring at the same time to keep it smooth. Mix the breadcrumbs with the pounded meat, season with one teaspoonful each of lemon juice and onion juice, and pepper and salt to taste; add six ounces of warmed butter, one teacupful of white stock or cream, the yolks of three eggs, and finally the well-beaten whites, and work the mixture till it is quite smooth. Put two tablespoonfuls of butter into a saucepan together with one tablespoonful of flour, and stir it over the fire until smooth but not browned, stir in by degrees one pint of cream, one tablespoonful of lemon juice, a little mace, plenty of pepper and salt, and boil for two minutes; then stir in the soaked gelatine, and remove it from the stove. Mix three breakfast cupfuls of cold cooked chicken in the sauce, and stand it one side till cool. Butter eighteen egg cups, line them with a thick layer of the forcemeat, fill the center with the chicken and sauce mixture (it should have become fairly firm), then cover it with the forcemeat. Stand the egg cups in a steamer, place a sheet of paper over them, place the cover on the steamer, set it over a saucepan of boiling water and steam the quenelles for thirty minutes or so without letting the water boil too rapidly. When cooked remove them from the pan and stand them one side till done. Turn the quenelles out of the egg-cups, dip them well in beaten eggs and breadcrumbs and fry for three minutes in boiling fat to lightly color them. Drain the quenelles, place them on a hot dish, garnish with stoned olives, and serve.
An elaborate two-part construction: a raw chicken forcemeat lining an egg cup, filled with a set chicken-and-cream salpicon, steamed, then crumbed and fried. Everything depends on the forcemeat holding together, so read the temperature point first.
- Keep the forcemeat coldSix ounces of butter and a cupful of cream will break out of a warm chicken puree, and the quenelle will weep fat in the steamer. Chill the meat, the bowl and the blade, work in short bursts, and refrigerate the mixture for 30 minutes before lining the cups. The instruction to add the butter "warmed" is best read as softened rather than fully melted.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in a minute or two. The passing through a fine sieve is not optional decoration - it removes sinew and gives the smooth, springy texture that defines a quenelle. Push it through a drum sieve or the finest mesh you have.
- The cup measuresA breakfast cupful is usually taken as roughly 1 cup (8-10 fl oz); a teacupful is smaller, somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup. These are approximations, so read the panade as about a cup of breadcrumbs boiled with about a cup of milk, and the forcemeat as taking roughly 3/4 cup of stock or cream.
- One ounce of gelatineThat is roughly four 1/4-oz envelopes of modern powdered gelatine, which will set a pint of cream sauce very firmly indeed. Two envelopes gives a filling that is sliceable but still tastes like sauce rather than aspic; the recipe only needs it firm enough to spoon into the lined cups without slumping.
- Egg cups as mouldsEighteen egg cups hold about 2 fl oz each. Buttered dariole moulds, small ramekins or a silicone mini-muffin tray do the same job. Butter them heavily and, if you want insurance, line the base with a disc of parchment.
- Steaming temperature"Without letting the water boil too rapidly" is the hinge. This is an egg-bound custard-textured farce; a hard boil curdles it and drives out the butter. Hold the water at a bare simmer for 30 minutes, and check that the centre reaches 165F before the cups leave the steamer - the frying stage is only three minutes and will not cook raw chicken through.
- "Stand them one side till done"Probably a slip for "till cold"; the same instruction appears earlier as "stand it one side till cool." Either way, the quenelles should be thoroughly chilled and firm before they are unmoulded, egged, crumbed and fried, or they may collapse in the fat.
- Frying fat"Boiling fat" means deep fat at about 375F. Three minutes at that heat colours the crumb without heating the interior much, which is why the steaming has to do the real cooking.
- YieldEighteen quenelles, two or three to a plate as an entree course - six to nine servings. The stoned olives are the whole garnish as written; a little of the reserved cream sauce, thinned and unset, spooned round the dish suits modern plating.
Quenelles came into American hotel cookery straight from the French repertoire, where a quenelle is a forcemeat of pounded flesh bound with panade and eggs, poached and served on its own or as a garnish for soups and vol-au-vents. This version works in that Escoffier-era idiom, and is characteristic of it: a plain quenelle is not enough, so it is hollowed out, filled with a gelatine-set salpicon of cooked chicken, then breaded and fried to give the surprise of a hot creamy centre inside a crisp shell. The technique - mould, chill, crumb, fry - is the same one behind croquettes and cromesquis. The recipe is also a good marker of how much hand work such cookery assumed: pounding, sieving, whipping whites and lining eighteen egg cups by hand.