SC - quenelles again...

[Philip & Susan Troy]

ChannonM at aol.com wrote:
> 
> In Ancient Cookery (15th C) the pommes dorree recipe calls for poaching and
> roasting the meat ball. It does have a differerent consistency that your
> average meatball as the meat is ground, poached then roasted (on spits) with
> gilding paste(flour, egg yolks and saffron). Maybe this is  the correlation
> you're discussing. I always thought the  "Pommes" part had more to do with
> the illusion of the shape and colour of the final product than a description
> of the type of food it is (quennelle vs meatball ).

Points in order, more or less: most recipes for pommes dorree do call
for a preliminary boiling and then a roasting to seal the dorree part,
the glaze. What I'm discussing isn't, I believe, much of a correlation,
which was pretty much why I brought it up; quenelles (modernly speaking,
but then I'm not aware of any really old use of the word) are made by
grinding, pounding and/or sieving the meat, poultry or fish, which not
only makes the bits uniformly tiny, but also removes almost all
connective tissue, and, finally, aerates the mixture so it is extremely
light, almost like a firm souffle. The mixture can be lightened with
added cream, egg whites, or even pate a choux. While I suppose it's
possible to sauce and glaze quenelles under a salamander (in which case
one is really glazing the sauce, not the quenelle), offhand I can't
recall any version that is roasted, and suspect they'd be pretty
unpleasant cooked that way. 

They appear to have entered mainstream French cuisine in the eighteenth
century via the regional cuisine of northwestern France, an area long
disputed with German states. The name appears to be a corruption of a
German word roughly denoting a noodle or dumpling, equivalent to the
Italian gnocchi. It's part of what appears to be an entirely different
tradition from medieval French or English court cookery. 

The only reason I can think of for translating "pomme" as "quenelle" is
concern that the reader would not understand about this fairly standard
medieval subtlety dish, but it fails in that it's not cool to translate
a foreign [to us] term for another one, and that quenelles are at best
only distantly related to pommes d'or.

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com