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The Special Sauces for Dinner

A sauce made by forming fowl and veal into quenelles, simmered in boiling water and served over stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Veal and truffle work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 815 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

The Special Sauces for Dinner

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Pound the fowl and veal with the butter in a marble mortar.

  2. Add salt, cayenne pepper, 1 whole egg, and 1 yolk; mix well.

  3. After a short time, add the remaining 3 yolks and mix thoroughly.

  4. Roll a small piece of the mixture in flour, about the size of a small cork.

  5. Place it in boiling water and simmer for a few minutes.

  6. Check for firmness; if not firm, add another whole egg and yolk.

Shape and cook

  1. Chop the truffles finely and mix into half of the quenelle mixture.

  2. Shape the mixture into marble-sized and cork-shaped pieces.

  3. Dust a slab with flour, roll out a strip, and cut into desired sizes.

  4. Cook the shaped quenelles in 1 pint of boiling water until firm.

  5. Transfer to a stewpan or bain-marie and pour over boiling stock before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Veal + truffletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together815 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Butter + truffletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the main lean body of the quenelle mixture, giving it its structure once cooked.
Veal
Adds a fine, tender texture to the mixture when pounded smooth.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture so the quenelles stay tender rather than dry.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set on cooking, giving the quenelles their firm shape.
Truffles
Add a earthy, aromatic flavour to the half of the mixture they are folded into.

The step that matters

Testing firmness with a poached sample. Eggs set when heated, so a mixture that is too loose will fall apart in the water. Poaching a test piece first shows whether more egg is needed before the whole batch is shaped and cooked.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More quenelles recipes

Veal 21Chicken 13of Fowl 11Fish 8Lobster 7Meat 6 See all 18 →

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