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Polenta Quenelles
Place three egg yolks in a bowl with one ounce butter, briskly stir with wooden spoon six minutes, or until creamy, then dredge in two and a half ounces yellow farina for polenta (Indian meal flour), season with two saltspoons salt, one saltspoon pepper and half saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well one minute. Have two quarts boiling water with a teaspoon salt in a saucepan on fire. Take up a teaspoon of the preparation, smooth surface with blade of a knife dipped in hot water, and with another teaspoon, also dipped in hot water, scoop out the preparation and drop it in the boiling water. Quickly proceed in same way until all the polenta is used. Boil until firm, drain on a cloth, neatly trim all around and use as directed.
A stiff enriched cornmeal paste poached in spoon-shaped dumplings, meant as a garnish rather than a dish on its own. The whole thing turns on the water being kept below a true boil.
- Water at a bare simmerThe recipe says boiling water, but a gentler poach (water barely shivering rather than rolling) is kinder to so soft a paste and reduces the risk of the quenelles breaking up.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the seasoning is 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper and a scant 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg.
- Weights, not volumesOne ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. Two and a half ounces of cornmeal is roughly half a cup, but weigh it: cornmeal packs unevenly and the paste depends on the ratio.
- "Yellow farina for polenta (Indian meal flour)"This is finely ground yellow cornmeal, the grind sold as fine polenta or corn flour rather than coarse grits. Coarse meal will not hydrate in the time given and the quenelles will be gritty.
- Let the paste standThe original goes straight from mixing to poaching. Ten minutes' rest lets the meal absorb moisture and firms the paste, which makes shaping far easier.
- Two-spoon shapingDipping the knife and the second spoon in hot water is the working detail, not decoration; the butter-rich paste sticks to dry metal. Keep a cup of hot water beside the pot and re-dip as you go.
- TimingPoach a test quenelle first. They are done when they float and feel set, generally 5 to 8 minutes at this size; overlong poaching makes them heavy and waterlogged.
- Yield and useAbout 18 to 24 teaspoon-sized quenelles. "Use as directed" points to instructions elsewhere in the book; quenelles of this sort were commonly served as a garnish in clear soup or arranged around a braise or ragout.
Polenta is the Italian name for a boiled cornmeal porridge, but corn itself reached northern Italy only after the Columbian exchange, displacing older gruels of millet, chestnut and buckwheat; by the nineteenth century it was the everyday starch of the Veneto and Lombardy. The quenelle, by contrast, is French kitchen vocabulary, a bound paste shaped between two spoons and poached, most often made of pike or veal. This recipe is a hybrid of the two: an Italian ingredient handled by French technique and served as a soup garnish. The phrase "Indian meal" was the standard English-language term for maize meal from the colonial era onward, distinguishing it from wheat flour.