No. 91

Game Quenelle Forcemeat

Farce a Quenelle de Gibier

Ingredients.—One pound of game, half a pound of calf's udder, half a pound of bread-crumbs soaked in hot milk, salt, red pepper, nutmeg, four egg-yolks and one whole egg.

Pass one pound of the breast of game twice through the machine (Fig. 47), pound it to a pulp and rub it through a sieve, then set it in a cool place or on the ice. Soak some bread-crumbs in milk, extract from them all the liquid, let them dry and get cool; pound the bread-crumbs with calf's udder in four different parts and continue the process until all is done, then season with salt, red pepper and nutmeg, half an ounce in all; add to this the game pulp, and continue pounding for ten minutes, then mix in four egg-yolks, singly, and one whole egg. Poach one of the quenelles in boiling water to discover its consistency, and if found necessary to rectify refer to No. 60.

← No. 90 Fish Quenelle Forcemeat Elementary Methods No. 92 Lamb or Veal Quenelle Forcemeat →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's quenelle forcemeats are the base for dumplings, garnishes, timbales and stuffings throughout The Epicurean. The method is sound; two of the ingredients and one of the tools need translating.

Calf's udderTétine de veau was the standard neutral binding fat in nineteenth-century French kitchens: poached, cooled, and pounded, it gives lightness without the taste of pork. It is effectively unobtainable now. Cold unsalted butter or blanched pork fatback in the same weight fills the role, butter for the finer texture and fatback for a firmer quenelle.
"The machine" (Fig. 47)Presumably a hand-cranked meat chopper of the kind Ranhofer illustrates. Two passes through the fine plate, then pounding, can largely be done in a food processor, though it will not do the work of the sieve -- but process in short pulses and keep everything under 40F, or the fat breaks and the mixture turns grainy.
The half ounce of seasoningHalf an ounce total is about 14 grams of salt, cayenne and nutmeg combined for roughly two and a quarter pounds of forcemeat, a little under 1.5 percent of seasoning overall and rather less than that in salt alone. That is in the region of modern practice, but the split between the three is left to the cook; weigh 12 g salt and add cayenne and nutmeg by pinches.
Bread-crumbs soaked in milkThis is a panade. Squeeze it genuinely dry — wrung out in a cloth, not just pressed — and cool it completely before pounding, or the residual hot milk will begin to cook the eggs and slacken the mix.
The test quenelle is the hingeDo not skip it. Poach a teaspoonful in barely simmering salted water for two or three minutes. If it falls apart it needs another yolk; if it is rubbery and tight it needs a spoonful of cold cream. Ranhofer sends you to his No. 60 for rectifying the consistency.
Poaching liquidThe recipe says boiling water, but quenelles are better dropped into water brought to a boil and then eased back to a bare tremble. At a rolling boil they swell, burst and go tough.
The gameBreast of pheasant, partridge, grouse or wild duck all work; venison loin also does, though it wants the fatback rather than butter. Remove every scrap of sinew before grinding, since the sieve is what catches it and sinew will clog it.
YieldAbout two and a quarter pounds of forcemeat — roughly 40 to 50 dessertspoon quenelles, or enough to garnish soup for a dozen. It keeps a day covered and refrigerated, and freezes raw.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole of that kitchen's practice in French professional order — hence the numbered "Elementary Methods" that later recipes cross-reference rather than repeat. Quenelle takes its name from the French, generally traced to the German Knödel, a dumpling; by the mid-nineteenth century the term meant specifically this pounded, sieved, egg-bound forcemeat, shaped between two spoons and poached. Calf's udder appears here because it was the classic tétine of the French garde-manger: cheap offal from the veal trade, nearly tasteless, and prized for producing a pale, delicate quenelle where pork fat would have coarsened both colour and flavour. That an American restaurant kitchen could count on a steady supply of it says a good deal about how completely Delmonico's was provisioned on Parisian lines, and about how much of the carcass a nineteenth-century butcher still expected to sell.