No. 82

Chicken Godiveau

Godiveau de Volaille

One pound of the white meat from a tender young chicken; three quarters of a pound of dry, brittie beef kidney suet, without skin or fibres; three quarters of an ounce of spiced salt (No. 168) two whole eggs; three quarters of a pound of cream panada, (No. 120); moisten and finish exactly the same as the veal godiveau (No. 85).

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a component recipe, not a finished dish: a chicken forcemeat meant to be piped or shaped into quenelles, used to line molds, or stuffed into birds and pastry. Ranhofer writes in cross-references, so the page only makes sense once you know what the numbers stand for.

The hinge: keep it coldGodiveau is an emulsion of raw meat, fat and panada, and it breaks if the suet warms and smears. Chill the meat, suet and panada thoroughly, work in short bursts, and rest the mixture over ice between stages. Ranhofer's kitchen pounded godiveau in a mortar and kept it cold throughout; a food processor does the same job in about a minute, pulsed.
Cream panada (No. 120)A thick paste of flour cooked in cream or milk, cooled until firm — essentially a stiff white roux-based binder. Here it is nearly as heavy as the meat, which is what gives quenelles their light, almost soufflé texture rather than a dense meatball.
Spiced salt (No. 168)Ranhofer's bulk seasoning mixture of salt with pepper and ground dried spices and herbs; check No. 168 for the exact proportions. Three quarters of an ounce is roughly 3 1/2 to 4 teaspoons by weight across a mixture of about 2.5 to 3 pounds, which is a firm but not excessive seasoning; if you substitute plain salt plus spices, hold back and taste-test before committing the batch.
Beef kidney suetThe hard fat from around the kidneys, dry and crumbly rather than soft — a butcher item, not the boxed shredded suet sold for puddings, which contains flour. Skin and membrane must be picked out completely or the forcemeat will be stringy.
"Moisten and finish"The veal godiveau it points to is moistened with iced water beaten in a little at a time, until the mixture is soft enough to drop from the spoon; check No. 85 for Ranhofer's exact wording. Add the liquid only after the meat, fat and panada are fully combined, or it will refuse to emulsify.
Always poach a testDrop a teaspoon of the finished mixture into barely simmering salted water for two or three minutes before shaping the rest. If it falls apart it needs more panada or egg; if it is rubbery it needs more iced water.
Poaching temperatureQuenelles are cooked in water or stock held just below a simmer, around 175F. A rolling boil bursts them.
YieldAbout 2.5 to 3 pounds of forcemeat once the eggs and moistening liquid are counted — enough for roughly 40 to 50 tablespoon-sized quenelles, or garnish for a large soup service. It halves cleanly.

A Little History

Godiveau is old French kitchen vocabulary for a pounded forcemeat bound with suet and panada, and by the nineteenth century it had settled into a family of standard preparations: veal godiveau as the master version, with chicken, pike and game as variations, which is exactly how Charles Ranhofer arranges them here in the Elementary Methods chapter of The Epicurean (1894). Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades, and the book is organized like a professional brigade's reference manual rather than a home cookbook — hence the terse cross-references to a panada and a spiced salt made up in bulk elsewhere. Forcemeats of this kind were the structural backbone of grand-service cooking: they filled timbales and vol-au-vents, garnished clear soups, lined molds for galantines, and turned trimmings into something that could be plated in identical portions. The heavy use of kidney suet, rather than the butter or cream a modern kitchen would reach for, reflects a period when hard beef fat was cheap, reliable and prized precisely because it held its shape until the moment it cooked.