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Boudins of Pickerel, Volga
Neatly trim skin and bones from a small three-pound pickerel, cut the perfect meat in small pieces, and place it in mortar with one whole egg. Thoroughly pound for two minutes, add one egg yolk, pound again for two minutes more, add another, sharply pound again, then finally add bread panada, another egg yolk, and briskly pound for five minutes, or until smooth. Remove paste from mortar and rub it through a wire sieve into a large bowl, set bowl on broken ice, add to force one teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne, one finely chopped truffle, two tablespoons sherry, and sharply stir with wooden spoon for five minutes. Divide preparation in twelve even parts, roll each part on a lightly floured table to egg form, lightly flatten with knife blade, arrange boudins in a sautoire, cover with hot water, add a teaspoon salt and boil for two minutes. Lift up and drain on a cloth, dip in beaten eggs, then roll them in bread crumbs. Thoroughly heat two tablespoons butter in frying pan, arrange the boudins in and fry for five minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a dish with folded napkin, decorate with a little parsley greens, and serve with Hollandaise vert-pre sauce separately.
This is a classic quenelle forcemeat under another name: pounded fish, panada and egg, poached, then breaded and fried. The whole dish stands or falls on keeping the paste cold.
- Keep it cold, alwaysThe bowl on broken ice is not decoration. Egg-and-fish forcemeat breaks if it is allowed to warm, and the boudins will then be slack and liable to fall apart in the poaching water. Chill the mortar or processor bowl, the fish and the eggs before starting, and return the paste to the refrigerator if you stop.
- The mortarA food processor does the work in well under the nine-odd minutes of pounding the recipe calls for. Pulse the fish alone first, add the whole egg, then the yolks one at a time, then the panada, scraping down between additions, and stop as soon as the paste is smooth. Then push it through a drum sieve or fine mesh with a plastic scraper -- that step removes stray bone and sinew and is worth the effort.
- Panada, quantity unstatedA bread panada is crustless white bread simmered in milk to a stiff paste and cooled. The recipe never says how much; a common proportion in forcemeats of this kind is something in the region of a third of the weight of the trimmed flesh, though practice varied widely. Start low, since too much panada makes the boudins pasty.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is half a teaspoon -- assertive but not extreme in a mixture this large. The teaspoon of salt in the forcemeat is separate from the teaspoon in the poaching water.
- PickerelIn American markets of the period this meant a small pike or a walleye; chain pickerel and northern pike also qualify. A three-pound whole fish yields well under a pound and a half of clean flesh. Any lean, firm white fish works -- pike is traditional for quenelles precisely because its slightly gluey flesh binds well.
- Sautoire and the poachingA sautoire is a straight-sided shallow pan. Lower the boudins into water that is barely trembling rather than a rolling boil, which tears them; two to three minutes sets the surface enough to bread them. They are not cooked through at this stage.
- The frying timeFive minutes a side in butter alone will scorch the crumbs long before the centres are done. Use butter with a little oil over medium heat, turn once, and reckon on three to four minutes a side for an inch-thick boudin -- the interior should reach 145F.
- Hollandaise vert-preSauce vert-pre here means hollandaise finished with a puree of blanched green herbs -- parsley, chervil, tarragon, chives -- squeezed dry and sieved in at the end. Add it off the heat so the sauce does not split.
- YieldTwelve boudins, which is four servings as a main course or six as a first course.
Boudin in French kitchen usage means a sausage shape rather than any particular filling, and a boudin de brochet -- pike forcemeat rolled, poached and often crumbed -- was a standard of the professional repertoire before this book. The Volga tag belongs to the late nineteenth-century habit of naming garnishes and preparations after places, rulers and rivers; the technique here is entirely French, and the Russian label attaches to nothing in the method. The folded napkin on the serving dish is a period service convention.