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Turtle Quenelles
Remove all the gristle, etc., from about twelve or fourteen ounces of turtle steak, cut it into pieces, place them in a mortar and pound well and then rub them through a fine sieve. Prepare a bread panada by working the crumb of a loaf in a saucepan with one ounce of butter, stirring well over the fire until the mixture does not adhere either to the spoon or the pan. Place the turtle puree back into the mortar, add one-half pound of bread panada and six ounces of butter; work them well together, adding two tablespoonfuls of brown sauce, the whites of three eggs and the yolks of five, a small quantity of powdered basil and grated nutmeg, salt and pepper to taste. Form the quenelles into shape with two tablespoons, plunge them into a saucepan of boiling consomme or rich broth, and poach. When done remove them, arrange them in a heap or a pyramid on a dish, and serve with a quantity of rich perigord sauce in a sauceboat.
The technique here is standard classical forcemeat work, but the main ingredient is no longer available to a lawful kitchen. The notes below explain the obstacle and decode the period vocabulary.
- The turtle is the problem"Turtle steak" in a Waldorf-era kitchen meant green sea turtle, shipped live or as frozen and canned meat from the Caribbean and Florida. Green turtles are now listed on CITES Appendix I and protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act; hawksbill and loggerhead likewise. Buying, selling, importing or possessing the meat is a criminal matter, not a matter of taste.
- Nor is freshwater turtle a drop-inSnapping and other freshwater turtles are regulated species-by-species and state-by-state, and many populations are closed to harvest. Their flesh is also a documented carrier of Salmonella and, in older animals, of accumulated mercury and PCBs. If you want quenelles, work from a current recipe built around a legal meat or fish.
- PanadaA panada is a paste of bread crumb cooked with butter until it pulls cleanly away from the pan and spoon; it is the binder that keeps a pounded forcemeat from weeping. Here "the crumb of a loaf" means the interior only, crusts discarded, and no liquid quantity is given at all -- the cook was expected to judge it by feel.
- Ambiguous quantitiesThe recipe calls for half a pound of panada made from an unspecified loaf and one ounce of butter, then six ounces more butter into twelve to fourteen ounces of meat. As printed, the ratios cannot be reproduced reliably.
- Mortar workThe pounding and sieving described is what a food processor and a drum sieve now do in minutes. The point of it is a puree with no fibre left in it, since any gristle missed at the trimming stage will show as a string in the finished quenelle.
- Perigord sauceA brown sauce, generally a demi-glace, finished with chopped black truffle from the Perigord; many versions also take Madeira. The truffle made the sauce a luxury signal in its own right.
- Poaching, not boilingThe instruction to plunge them into boiling consomme is the one line a modern cook would change on grounds of craft rather than law: a hard boil breaks an egg-and-butter forcemeat. Classical practice is barely trembling liquid.
Turtle was one of the defining luxuries of nineteenth-century hotel and banquet cooking, and green turtle soup was a fixture of American formal menus in the 1880s and 1890s. Live turtles were shipped north from the West Indies and Key West and kept in hotel cellars, which is how a kitchen such as the Waldorf's came to have turtle steak on hand as a raw material for something as fussy as a quenelle. Quenelles themselves are French, the word generally traced to the German Knodel by way of Alsace, and by Oscar Tschirky's day they had become a standard test of a garde-manger's skill: pounded meat, panada, butter and egg, shaped between two spoons and poached to a texture between a dumpling and a mousse. The dish records both a technical high point and a habit of consumption that helped push sea turtle populations to the brink; the trade the recipe depends on was largely shut down by international protection in the 1970s.