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Fish Quenelles for Garnishing
Place one and a half ounces fresh codfish or halibut in a mortar with an egg white and pound to a paste; remove from the mortar, press through a sieve into a bowl, season with two saltspoons salt, one saltspoon each cayenne pepper and grated nutmeg. Mix well with a tablespoon, add little by little a half gill cream, continually mixing while adding it. With a sheet of white paper make a cornet, then drop the preparation into the cornet; cut off a very small piece of the cornet at the bottom as an opening, press down the force into a lightly buttered tin to the size and form of small cranberries, pour in sufficient hot water to cover them entirely and season with half teaspoon salt; place the tin on the fire and let boil for half a minute, remove from the tin, drain, keep on a plate and use as directed.
A classic soup garnish: a fish forcemeat piped into pellets and poached for seconds. The whole batch is smaller than it looks, and the technique lives or dies on temperature.
- Keep everything coldThe hinge of the recipe. Fish, egg white, cream and bowl should all be refrigerator-cold, and the paste should rest chilled before piping. Warm forcemeat breaks when the cream goes in and the quenelles fall apart in the water.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of salt is half a teaspoon. Half a gill is a quarter cup of cream.
- Scale of the batchAn ounce and a half of fish yields perhaps two dozen cranberry-sized pellets, enough to garnish four to six soup plates. Multiply freely; the proportions hold.
- Mortar or processorA small food processor does the pounding and largely does the sieving too, but push the puree through a fine sieve anyway to catch sinew. Pulse in short bursts so the friction does not warm the paste.
- The cream is a maximum, not a targetA quarter cup to an ounce and a half of fish is generous. Add it a spoonful at a time and stop when the paste holds a soft peak on the spoon; too loose and the quenelles spread into threads.
- The paper cornetA rolled paper cone with the tip snipped off, the standard piping tool of the period. A small piping bag with a plain 1/4-inch tip is the same thing and easier to control.
- Poach, never boilWater at a rolling boil shreds them. Bring the pan to a bare tremble, around 175-180F, and hold it there. Half a minute is right for pellets this small, but judge by feel: they are done when they float and feel just set, opaque through.
- Test one firstPoach a single quenelle before committing the batch. If it disintegrates, beat a little more egg white into the remaining paste; if it is rubbery, slacken it with cream.
- Holding themDrain onto a plate and cover with a damp cloth or a film of cold stock. They keep a few hours refrigerated and are warmed through in the hot soup at the moment of serving, not reheated on their own.
Quenelle came into French from the Alsatian and German Knödel, dumpling, and by the nineteenth century it named something far more refined than its ancestor: a pounded forcemeat of pike, veal or chicken, lightened with egg and cream, shaped and gently poached. The pike quenelle of Lyon is the celebrated version, but there is also the miniature form given here, piped out no bigger than a berry and dropped into consommes and garnished fish dishes by the dozen. A book of this period assumes the reader has a mortar and the patience to use it, since the sieve was the only way to get the silky texture that a blade now delivers in seconds.