No. 761

Tartlets of Noques with Parmesan Garnishing

Garniture de Tartelettes de Noques au Parmesan

Line some large tartlet molds with fine paste (No. 135) and prick the paste. Prepare a pate-a-chou with cheese (No. 132), lay it on a floured table and divide it into several pieces; roll them with the hands into strings the thickness of macaroni, then cut them across into pieces the same length as their thickness; place them on a sieve containing a little flour, and toss them so that they form into small balls, then plunge these balls into boiling, salted water. Let the water boil up twice, set them on one side of the range until the paste is well poached, and then drain them through a colander. Put on the fire to reduce two or three gills of good bechamel (No. 409), incorporating into it slowly a few spoonfuls of mushroom broth and some raw cream; when well thickened finish with few spoonfuls of melted glaze (No. 402), take it from the fire and throw in the noques; let simmer for five minutes on a very slow fire, and then add butter and parmesan cheese, and a little grated nutmeg, fill the tartlet molds with this preparation; smooth the surface neatly and dredge a little parmesan on top, bake them in the oven for a quarter of an hour, unmold the tartlets and serve them exceedingly hot.

← No. 760 Tartlets a la Parmentier Garnishings No. 762 Polenta Tartlets →

For the Modern Kitchen

A garnish course from Ranhofer's The Epicurean, built on tiny cheese choux dumplings bound in béchamel and baked in pastry cases. It reads as a chain of cross-references; the whole thing is manageable once you know what each number stands for.

The hinge: poach gently, never boil hardThe noques are choux paste, and a rolling boil will tear them apart and leave them waterlogged. Bring the salted water to a boil, drop them in, let it come back up twice, then move the pan to the edge of the heat so the water barely trembles until the dumplings are set through — a few minutes at most.
GillsTwo or three gills of béchamel is one to one and a half cups. Reduced with mushroom liquor and cream it will thicken considerably, so start looser than you want to finish.
The cross-referenced componentsNo. 135 fine paste is a rich short pastry; No. 132 is choux paste with grated cheese worked in; No. 409 is a standard béchamel; No. 402 "glaze" is glace de viande, meat stock reduced to a syrup. A spoonful of good demi-glace or a reduced veal stock stands in for the last.
Oven heatNo temperature is given. Note that the shells are not blind-baked: Ranhofer lines and pricks the molds, fills them, and bakes once for the quarter hour called for. A moderate oven, around 375F, will set the pastry and brown the dredged Parmesan.
Prick the paste, and weight itRanhofer pricks the pastry to stop it lifting. With modern butter pastry, line the molds, prick, chill, then bake with beans or pie weights — a slumped shell will not hold a slack béchamel filling.
Mushroom brothThis is the strained cooking liquor from mushrooms, not a stock cube. The soaking liquid from dried mushrooms, reduced, gives the same concentrated savour.
Rolling the noquesCutting the macaroni-thick ropes into cubes and tossing them in a floured sieve rounds them without handling each one. Keep the flour light or the dumplings turn pasty.
Yield and servingA cup and a half of sauce with the dumplings will fill several large tartlet molds; Ranhofer gives no number. The recipe sits in the Garnishings section, so these are intended to be set around a roast or entrée rather than served as a course on their own, and the instruction is to serve them 'exceedingly hot'.

A Little History

Noques is the French spelling of the Alsatian and southern German Nocken or Nockerl, small dumplings of the same family as spätzle; the word is generally traced to a Germanic root meaning a lump or knob. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, was born at Saint-Denis and trained in Paris, and his book absorbs this kind of German-border cookery into the classical repertoire without comment — here the dumplings are made from cheese choux rather than a flour batter, poached, sauced with béchamel and glaze, and set in a pastry case, which is the standard nineteenth-century French method of turning any modest component into a formal garnish. The long Garnishings section it belongs to is a reminder of how service worked in that era: a roast was never sent out alone, but ringed with small individual constructions like these, each with its own recipe number.