No. 88

Salmon Forcemeat for Mousseline

Farce de Saumon pour Mousselines

One pound of pared fish pounded and seasoned with half an ounce of salt, cayenne pepper and nutmeg, then rub through the sieve the same as the cream chicken forcemat. Return it to the mortar and work into it one raw egg-white, half a pint of bechamel (No. 409) and two tablespoonfuls of cream forcemeat (No. 76). Put it on to the ice, work vigorously and when very cold incorporate gradually into it equal quantity of well drained whipped cream. Serve this in timbales as hors-d'oeuvre or garnishing.

← No. 87 Game Forcemeat for Mousseline Elementary Methods No. 89 Chicken Quenelle Forcemeat, with Soubise or →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic farce mousseline: raw fish pounded with béchamel and lightened with whipped cream, then poached in molds. Ranhofer assumes you have already read his entries for cream chicken forcemeat, béchamel and cream forcemeat, so the page reads as shorthand.

Temperature is the hingeThe mixture must stay near freezing from the moment the cream goes in, or the emulsion breaks and the poached mousseline weeps. Chill the bowl, the blade and the cream, and work over ice as directed.
Pared fishOne pound of salmon skinned, boned and trimmed of the dark bloodline and any sinew; the pound is presumably the trimmed weight, so buy somewhat more fillet than a pound.
Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in under a minute. Pass the purée through a fine drum sieve or tamis afterwards anyway; that step is what makes the texture silken rather than merely smooth.
Half an ounce of saltAbout two and a half teaspoons of fine salt to a pound of fish, perhaps 1.5 to 2 percent of the finished mixture depending on how much cream goes in — high by modern taste but deliberate, since salt also helps the fish proteins bind. Taste a poached test spoonful before molding and scale back if it is too aggressive.
Half a pint of béchamelOne cup, and it should be cold and stiff, not warm and pourable. Warm sauce will slacken the farce and make the whipped cream impossible to fold in.
Equal quantity of whipped creamRanhofer does not say equal to what. It is usually read as equal in volume to the pounded fish base — start with a cup of cream whipped to soft peaks and drained in a sieve, and stop folding when the mixture holds a spoon upright.
Cooking the timbalesThe forcemeat is raw as written. Butter small molds, fill, cover with buttered paper and poach in a water bath at 170F until just set, 20 to 30 minutes depending on size, to an internal 145F.
YieldEnough for eight to ten small timbales as an hors-d'oeuvre, or a garnish for a fish course serving the same number. It can also be piped into quenelles and poached the same way.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer spent more than thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole grammar of that kitchen — hence the numbered cross-references, which work like a code rather than a cookbook. Mousseline forcemeat belongs to the late nineteenth-century French repertoire in which panades and bread-bound stuffings gave way to lighter mixtures bound with cream, a shift generally credited to the same generation of chefs that produced Escoffier's codification a few years later. Salmon was the natural fish for it in New York: pink and firm enough to bind. The dish also shows how much of Delmonico's grandeur was built out of small repeated components — this farce is not a course in itself but a building block, listed under Elementary Methods alongside the chicken and game versions, ready to be spooned into timbale molds or used to stuff something larger.