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Bread Panade
Soak two ounces stale bread in cold milk for three minutes, take up bread and with the hands completely squeeze out the milk. Place bread in a small saucepan with a half ounce butter, and with a small spatula sharply work until of a smooth consistency, so that it will not stick either to pan or spatula, transfer to a plate, cover with a sheet of buttered paper and use only when completely cold.
A panade is not a dish in itself but a binder — the starch paste that keeps quenelles, forcemeats and stuffed poultry from turning grainy or weeping fat. The technique is simple; the discipline is in the drying and the cooling.
- What it is forTwo ounces of bread and half an ounce of butter make a small quantity. The recipe gives no yield, but on classical proportions this would bind something in the order of half a pound to a pound of pounded fish, veal or poultry for quenelles or a fine forcemeat. Scale it up in proportion if you need more.
- Weights, not volumesTwo ounces is about 55 g of bread, which is two thick slices of a close-crumbed white loaf with the crusts off. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon. Weighing matters here because a wetter or drier panade changes the whole texture of the finished forcemeat.
- Use the right bread"Stale bread" means a day-or-two-old plain white loaf with a tight crumb, not a sourdough or a seeded bread. Modern soft sandwich bread collapses into paste rather than absorbing cleanly; a decent pain de mie or brioche-free white tin loaf is closest to what was meant.
- Squeeze harder than feels rightThe three-minute soak is only to soften; the milk is then almost entirely wrung out. Bread left sodden will not dry properly over the heat and the panade will loosen the forcemeat.
- The hinge: work it over heat until it leaves the panThe hinge: work it until it leaves the pan -- The recipe says only to work the mixture in the saucepan with a spatula until it is smooth and no longer sticks to pan or spatula; it does not specify heat, though classical practice is to dry a panade over low heat until it forms a single mass that pulls cleanly away, as with choux. Panade left too wet is a common reason quenelles break up in the poaching water.
- Buttered paper means buttered paperPressing a buttered sheet, or a piece of buttered parchment, directly onto the surface stops a skin forming. A skin will show as hard flecks through the finished forcemeat.
- Completely cold is not optionalWarm panade melts the fat in whatever you pound it into, and the mixture separates. Spread it thin on the plate and chill it thoroughly, as the recipe insists; it stiffens further as it sits.
Panade comes straight from the French pain, bread, and in classical kitchen French denotes any starch paste — bread, flour, rice or potato — used to bind and lighten a forcemeat. It is one of the small preparatory recipes that a book called The International Cook Book includes not as a dish but as a component, on the assumption that the reader is working through quenelles, godiveaux and stuffings in the French manner then dominant in professional and aspirational American cooking. The bread version is the plainest of the family; the flour-and-milk sort, essentially a stiff panada cooked like choux paste, sits beside it in the classical repertoire. The same word travelled a second route into English cookery as the name of a soup — bread simmered in broth — which is why panada appears in older books meaning invalid food, a soft sop for the sick, and why the two senses are easily confused.