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Chicken Quenelle for Garnishing
Remove all the sinews from a half pound of raw white chicken meat. Finely chop, place in a cold mortar and thoroughly pound it, then add two ounces bread panade, mix well, add three egg yolks one by one and sharply pound for five minutes. Remove and carefully rub through a fine wire sieve into a bowl, set bowl on ice, season with half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne, half saltspoon grated nutmeg, and sharply stir with wooden spoon for two minutes. Whisk one and a half gills thick cream to a froth, then gradually add to bowl and mix well for one minute. With a sheet of heavy white paper make a small cornet, cut away the tip end, drop chicken force in and press out preparation into a lightly buttered tin to the size and form of medium cranberries. Pour in enough hot water to cover, season with half teaspoon salt, boil for two minutes, drain and use as required.
A classic forcemeat garnish: tiny poached dumplings of pounded chicken, meant to be dropped into clear soup or arranged around a platter. The technique is fussy but the logic is simple, and a food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar does in ten minutes.
- Keep it cold — this is the hingeThe cream must be cold, the puree must be cold, and the bowl sits on ice for a reason. If the mixture warms, the emulsion of egg, cream and protein breaks and the quenelles disintegrate in the water. Chill the puree thoroughly before the cream goes in, and test one dumpling before piping the rest.
- Bread panadeTwo ounces of panade means bread cooked with milk (or water) to a stiff paste and cooled — bread soaked in a little milk, then dried out over heat until it leaves the pan clean. The two ounces is the weight of the finished panade, not of the dry bread. It is a binder, not a filler; do not substitute dry crumbs.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of cream is about 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon — so a full 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne here, and an eighth of a teaspoon of nutmeg.
- Mortar or machinePulse the sinew-free chicken in a food processor until smooth, add the panade, then the yolks one at a time. The sieving step is not optional if you want the silky texture the recipe is after: push the puree through a fine sieve to catch stray sinew and fibre.
- Paper cornetA cone rolled from stiff paper with the tip snipped off — a disposable piping bag. A small plain piping tube, or two teaspoons used to shape quenelles, works as well. "The size of medium cranberries" is roughly half to three-quarters of an inch.
- Do not actually boilTwo minutes at a rolling boil will toss these apart. Poach in water held just below a simmer, barely trembling at around 170–180°F, until they firm up and float — two to four minutes for cranberry-sized pieces. Cut one open to confirm it is set through, not translucent in the middle.
- Yield and useHalf a pound of chicken with the panade, yolks and cream makes a large quantity of small quenelles — enough to garnish a good many bowls of consommé. They can be poached ahead, held in cold water or lightly buttered, and reheated briefly in hot broth.
The quenelle is the French kitchen's most refined use of forcemeat, and the word is generally traced to the German Knödel, dumpling — an association with Alsace and Lorraine, where the technique was long at home. In the grand service of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, quenelles were classified by size and purpose: large ones served as a dish in their own right with a velvety sauce, and pea- or cranberry-sized ones like these used as garnish, dropped into clear soups or ranged around a chicken or sweetbread entrée. The closing direction to 'use as required' marks this as a chef's mise en place item.