No. 122

Wheat and Rice Flour Panada

Panade de Farine de Gruau et de Riz

Wheat Flour.—Boil half a pint of broth with half an ounce of butter, remove it to the side of the fire, and add to it four or five ounces of flour, or as much as it can absorb, stir the paste quickly, return it to a slow fire to dry, do not cease stirring until it detaches from the saucepan. Pour it into a bowl, cover with a round piece of buttered paper, and set it away to cool.

Rice Flour.—Have one pint of white broth or milk and half an ounce of butter; boil together and add sufficient rice flour to form a paste, let it dry, then set it away with a buttered paper cover to get cool.

← No. 121 Panada of Flour and Milk, Bread-Crumbs, and Elementary Methods No. 123 Parsley Bouquet, in Branches, Fried or Chopp →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a working component, not a dish: a stiff flour paste used to bind forcemeats and quenelles elsewhere in The Epicurean. Two versions are given, wheat and rice, and both live or die by how thoroughly you dry them.

The hinge: dry it until it leaves the panKeep stirring over low heat until the mass balls up and pulls cleanly away from the sides and bottom, leaving a thin film rather than smears. An underdried panada carries free water into a quenelle mixture and the quenelles slacken and break up in the poaching liquid.
MeasuresRanhofer's pint is the US 16 fl oz, so the wheat version is 1 cup broth to 1/2 oz (1 tbsp) butter and 4-5 oz flour, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups. That is a very high flour-to-liquid ratio, closer to a stiff dough than to a choux paste. Add the flour in stages and stop when it stops absorbing.
"Remove it to the side of the fire"On a coal range the side was the cooler zone. Pull the pan off the burner entirely to beat in the flour, then return it to low heat for the drying stage.
White brothA pale unroasted stock, veal or chicken, made without browning the bones or the vegetables so the finished forcemeat stays light in colour. An unsalted or lightly salted commercial chicken stock works; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced.
Rice flourUse fine white rice flour, not glutinous (sweet) rice flour, which behaves quite differently. Rice flour generally gelatinizes at a higher temperature than wheat and tends to give a softer bind, useful in delicate fish forcemeats. Ranhofer gives no quantity here, only enough to form a paste.
Buttered paperA round of parchment cut to the bowl's diameter, buttered on the side that touches the paste, keeps a skin from forming. Plastic wrap pressed to the surface does the same job.
Yield and keepingKeeping -- Cool it fully, refrigerate covered, and use within two days; it is a stock-and-dairy paste and will sour.
Working it coldPanada is added cold to pounded meat or fish rather than warm; if it goes in warm the fat in the forcemeat softens and the mixture can separate when poached.

A Little History

Panada takes its name from the Latin panis, bread, and originally meant just that: bread soaked in broth or milk, which is the method Ranhofer gives immediately before this one at No. 121. By the nineteenth century French professional kitchens had extended the word to any starch paste used to bind a forcemeat, and the flour version here is essentially the panade that survives in classical quenelle and mousseline practice. Its placement in the "Elementary Methods" chapter is telling: Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades and published The Epicurean in 1894, built the book like a professional manual, with the small preparations set out first so that the hundreds of later recipes could simply call for "panada No. 122" and move on.