No. 90

Fish Quenelle Forcemeat

Farce a Quenelle de Poisson

Fish forcemeats are prepared with the raw meats of either pike, bass or sheepshead, increasing the weight with panada for those fishes requiring more consistence, such as cod, etc. any fish lacking body, such as whiting, etc., can be mixed with sheepshead, bass or others. Pike meat is renowned as having plenty of consistence and is easy to procure. Prepare one pound of pike meat free of bones and skin, pound it well and when reduced to a paste take it out of the mortar. Pound one pound of cream panada (No. 120), with eight ounces of lobster butter, add the pike meat, pound again all together, then mix in slowly six raw egg-yolks, salt, nutmeg, sweet peppers and Hungarian paprika pepper; press the forcemeat through a sieve and put it in a thin metal vessel on ice, beat it well to have it smooth. Poach a small piece to try its consistence and rectify if needed, either by adding cream or panada, mixing the farce to the latter, a little at the time. To this forcemeat is frequently added some tomatoed soubise or mushroom puree and if required to be very light beat in two well whipped egg-whites.

← No. 89 Chicken Quenelle Forcemeat, with Soubise or Elementary Methods No. 91 Game Quenelle Forcemeat →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's fish forcemeat is a classic quenelle base: pounded lean fish, a cream panada for body, and enriched butter, all held cold and lightened with egg. Nearly everything that can go wrong with it comes down to temperature.

Keep it cold, alwaysThe hinge of the whole preparation. Fish protein and butter will separate the moment the mixture warms, and Ranhofer has the finished forcemeat beaten in a thin metal vessel set on ice. Chill the fish, the panada and the bowl, and if you use a food processor work in short bursts and return the mixture to the refrigerator whenever it loses its chill.
Mortar to machineA food processor does in a couple of minutes what the original pounding took far longer to accomplish. Puree the fish alone first, then the panada and lobster butter, then combine, and finally add the yolks with the machine running. The sieving step is still worth doing for a truly fine quenelle.
Cream panada (No. 120)A separate preparation in this book: a panada cooked down in cream to a stiff paste and cooled. It is the binder that gives the forcemeat body. A pound of panada to a pound of fish is a rich, soft ratio; more panada gives a firmer, plainer quenelle.
Lobster butterRanhofer means compound butter made by pounding lobster shells and coral with butter, then straining. It is for colour and flavour, not fat alone. Plain butter will work but the result is pale and much less interesting.
The fishPike remains ideal because it is lean and gelatinous. Sheepshead is regional and inconsistently available; walleye, pickerel, haddock, or lean whitefish substitute well. Avoid oily fish, which breaks the emulsion, and be scrupulous about pin bones since sieving will not catch them all.
"Sweet peppers"Most likely ground sweet pepper rather than the vegetable. If so, it overlaps heavily with the Hungarian paprika listed beside it, and a scant teaspoon of good sweet paprika will stand in for both.
The test quenelleDo not skip it. Poach a teaspoon of the mixture in barely trembling salted water around 170F for two or three minutes and taste. Too firm, work in cream; too loose, work in panada, always a little at a time.
Poaching the finished quenellesShape with two wet spoons and poach in water or fish stock held just below a simmer. A rolling boil will blow them apart. Four to six minutes for a tablespoon-sized quenelle; they float and firm when done.
YieldSomething under three pounds of forcemeat, enough for roughly forty small quenelles or eight to ten servings as a garnished course, or enough to stuff a large whole fish.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole French professional repertoire as it was practised in an American city. Quenelle forcemeats occupy a long run of numbered entries in his Elementary Methods precisely because they were structural: the same paste turned into soup garnish, timbale linings, fish stuffings and the lightest of entrées. The word quenelle is generally traced to the German Knödel, dumpling, and came into French cooking by way of Alsace and Lorraine; by the nineteenth century quenelles de brochet, pike quenelles, were a Lyonnais signature. Ranhofer's mention of sheepshead is the American detail here. It was a common and well regarded market fish on the Atlantic coast in his day, valued for firm flesh, and appears throughout the book in places a Paris chef would have written something else.