No. 2330

Quenelles of Fish, Montglas

Quenelles de Poisson a la Montglas

This entree is to be dressed in the center of a carved border made of rice croustade (No. 160). Prepare a fish quenelle forcemeat (No. 90) with pike perch; when strained put it into a thin metal vessel, and with a spoon incorporate in, while working it on ice, two spoonfuls of good bechamel sauce (No. 409) reduced with a coffeespoonful of powdered curry, diluting with the mushroom liquor; keep the forcemeat on ice. With the head and parings of the pike perch make a good white wine court-bouillon (No. 39); strain, free it of fat, and reduce to a half-glaze. Put on to reduce three gills of veloute sauce (No. 415), and incorporate the court-bouillon slowly into it, also a few spoonfuls of the reduced mushroom broth. Strain the sauce when succulent and sufficiently thickened; pour it into a small saucepan and stir it occasionally on the side of the range. Prepare a plentiful montglas, composed of truffles, mushrooms, and cooked lobster-claw meat; mingle in a few spoonfuls of reduced veloute sauce (No. 415), and keep it in a bain-marie; prepare also a fine salpicon of trimmed and poached oysters, add a few spoonfuls of good reduced veloute sauce and the oyster liquor, finishing with a coffeespoonful of anchovy essence, paste or puree; let this preparation get cool, then divide it into small parts, and roll each one to the shape of a long olive. With the fish forcemeat mold some quenelles with a soupspoon (No. 155); stuff them with the salpicon rolled in olive-shapes, and cover with more of the forcemeat; smooth the surfaces nicely; poach these quenelles in salted water without allowing the liquid to boil, and as soon as the forcemeat stiffens drain on to a cloth. Dress the montglas in the center of the rice border, and between the latter and the montglas range the quenelles standing almost upright; cover them lightly with the prepared sauce, and serve at the same time a bowlful of the same, buttering it well, and finishing it at the last moment with a piece of lobster butter (No. 580).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A three-part construction — a curried fish forcemeat, a stuffed core, and a velouté finished with the fish's own court-bouillon — assembled around a rice border. Ranhofer writes for a brigade with numbered base recipes on hand; the notes below cover what has to be translated before a single cook can attempt it.

Never let the poaching water boilThis is the hinge. A quenelle forcemeat of this kind will swell, burst and shed its stuffing at a rolling boil. Hold the salted water barely trembling, well below a simmer, and lift the quenelles as soon as the forcemeat has stiffened, as Ranhofer directs, rather than by the clock.
Gills and coffeespoonsA gill is half a cup, so three gills of velouté is 1 1/2 cups. A coffeespoonful is smaller than a modern teaspoon -- commonly reckoned at about half of one -- and worth erring low with both the curry and the anchovy.
Pike perchThis is the walleye or European zander, a lean, fine-grained fish that purées to a pale, firm forcemeat. Pike, cod, haddock or hake behave much the same way. Ask for the head and frame; the recipe depends on them for the court-bouillon that flavors the sauce.
What a montglas isNot a sauce but a garnish: a dice of truffle, mushroom and here lobster-claw meat, bound with a little reduced velouté. The name is generally traced to the Marquis de Montglas, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and the garnish also turns up as a filling for vol-au-vents and timbales.
The oyster salpiconTrim and poach the oysters only briefly, until their edges ruffle. They are then cut fine, bound with reduced velouté and the oyster liquor, chilled firm, and rolled into olive shapes that go inside each quenelle. Overcooked oysters at this stage turn rubbery and stay that way through the second poaching.
Working the forcemeat on iceThe metal bowl over ice is not fussiness. A fish forcemeat is an emulsion of protein, fat and liquid, and if it is allowed to warm while you beat in the béchamel and mushroom liquor it risks breaking and poaching into a grainy mass.
Molding with a soupspoonTwo spoons dipped in hot water: scoop with one, scrape and turn against the other until you have a smooth three-sided oval. For stuffed quenelles, lay a bed of forcemeat in the spoon, set the olive of salpicon in it, cap with more forcemeat and smooth the surface before turning it out.
Lobster butter and the sauce boatLobster butter (No. 580) is a compound butter, typically shells and coral pounded with butter and strained, not a cooked sauce. Ranhofer has it going in at the last moment; boiling it dulls the color and risks splitting the sauce.
Scale and substitutionThe rice croustade border (No. 160) is a carved, molded case of cooked rice. A shallow serving dish with a piped rice or duchesse potato rim is the practical modern equivalent. Ranhofer gives no yield, so the number of servings has to be judged from the amount of forcemeat you make.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for more than thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the working repertoire of that restaurant set down in print — over a thousand pages of cross-referenced numbers, written on the assumption that a reader has stock, velouté, béchamel and forcemeat already going. Quenelles were the showpiece of that style: an ordinary lean fish pounded, sieved, enriched and re-formed into something smoother and more expensive than the fish it came from, then stuffed with a second preparation hidden inside. The layering here is deliberate and characteristic — curry in the forcemeat, anchovy in the oyster core, lobster butter in the sauce, three separate savory registers in one bite. The garnish name à la Montglas is one of dozens of classical labels the book uses as shorthand, and its survival in a New York cookbook shows how completely the American luxury restaurant of the Gilded Age had adopted the French codification of Carême and Gouffé, down to the vocabulary.