No. 62

Chicken or Game Forcemeat Without Panada

Farce de Volaille ou de Gibier Sans Panade

Ingredients.—One pound of breast of chicken or game, raw and free of sinews; eight egg-yolks, half a pound of butter, salt, red pepper, nutmeg and two gills of well reduced veloute (No. 415). Pass twice through the machine (Fig. 47). One pound of raw and nerveless chicken or game fillets, or else chop the pieces very fine and pound them to reduce to a fine paste; rub this through a round quenelle sieve (Fig. 142). Incorporate into it eight egg-yolks one by one, also half a pound of butter divided into small pieces; season with salt, red pepper and nutmeg, and add two gills of well reduced veloute (No. 415). Work the forcemeat well in a mortar, so that it acquires a good consistence; test it and if necessary to rectify (see No. 60). This forcemeat is used to make either red, white or green quenelles.

← No. 61 To Prepare Bread Stuffing, American and Engl Elementary Methods No. 63 Forcemeat of Chicken, Fish or Game with Whip →

For the Modern Kitchen

A rich quenelle forcemeat bound with egg yolk, butter and reduced velouté rather than the usual bread panada. The whole thing hinges on temperature: this is an emulsion, and if the butter warms past softness while you work it, it breaks.

Keep it coldChill the meat, the butter and the bowl, and work in short bursts, resting the mixture in the refrigerator if it looks greasy or begins to separate. A broken forcemeat will weep fat into the poaching liquid and the quenelles will collapse.
Gills and quantitiesA gill is half a cup, so two gills of velouté is one cup. The proportions are one pound of trimmed breast meat, eight yolks, half a pound (two sticks) of butter and that cup of sauce.
The machine and the sieveFig. 47 appears to be a hand-cranked meat grinder and Fig. 142 a drum or tamis-type sieve. A food processor does both jobs: grind the cold meat to a paste, then press it through a fine sieve with a plastic scraper to remove sinew. The sieving is not optional if you want the texture the recipe is after.
Red pepperIn Ranhofer's usage this means cayenne, not paprika or bell pepper. Use it sparingly; a large pinch for the pound.
Velouté No. 415A white sauce: stock thickened with a blond roux, simmered and skimmed, then reduced until it coats a spoon heavily. Best used cold and stiff, or it may loosen the forcemeat.
Test before you commitThe usual test is to poach a teaspoon of the mixture in barely simmering salted water for a couple of minutes and taste it; No. 60 is the cross-reference for rectifying it. Too firm, work in a little more velouté or a spoonful of cream; too soft to hold shape, another yolk.
Poaching the quenellesShape with two wet spoons and poach in water or light stock held just below a simmer, around 175-180F. A rolling boil will blow them apart. Three to five minutes for a tablespoon-sized quenelle.
ColouringThe red, white and green quenelles are made by working in a little lobster or crayfish butter, nothing, or blanched spinach purée squeezed very dry. Wet colourings slacken the mix, so compensate with a firmer test.
YieldA little over two pounds of forcemeat, enough for a good number of small garnish quenelles or a generous filling for a large timbale. It is very rich and served as a garnish, not a portion.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its opening "Elementary Methods" chapter is essentially a French professional's manual dropped into an American kitchen. A panade — bread soaked in milk, or a cooked flour paste — was the standard binder for forcemeat, cheap and forgiving; leaving it out, as here, produces a finer and considerably more expensive result, held together by egg yolk, butter and reduced velouté alone. This is the sort of forcemeat that became quenelles floating in a consommé or lining a timbale, garnishes whose whole purpose was to show that the kitchen had the labour to pound, sieve and mortar a pound of breast meat into silk. The technique is generally traced to the classical French repertoire of the early nineteenth century, Carême's generation, and survived largely unchanged into Escoffier's; the food processor has since made in ninety seconds what once occupied an apprentice for an hour.