Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Quenelles

A dish of chicken quenelles cooked in stock and served with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chicken and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,417 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Chicken Quenelles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken mixture

  1. Remove the skin from the chicken and take all the flesh from the bones.

  2. Chop and pound the meat very fine.

  3. Mix the chopped pork with the chicken and rub through a flour sieve.

  4. Cook the stale bread and milk together for 10 minutes, stirring often until smooth.

  5. Add the bread mixture to the chicken.

  6. Add the seasoning, stock or cream, and the egg yolks one by one.

  7. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Shape and poach

  1. Grease a frying pan with soft butter.

  2. Dip one tablespoon in boiling water, fill it with the mixture.

  3. Dip another spoon in hot water and transfer the mixture into it to shape the quenelles.

  4. Slip the shaped quenelles into the frying pan.

  5. Continue until all the mixture is shaped.

  6. Cover the quenelles with boiling white stock, slightly salted, and cook gently for 20 minutes.

  7. Remove the quenelles and drain for a minute.

Serve

  1. Arrange them on a border of mashed potatoes or fried bread.

  2. Pour a spoonful of Bechamel, mushroom, or chive sauce on each quenelle and the remainder in the center of the dish.

  3. Serve hot.

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. Chicken + porktop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,417 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Forms the main structure and body of the quenelles once cooked.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set when heated, giving the quenelles a firm, tender structure.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, giving a softer, more tender texture.
Stale bread
Absorbs milk and adds body, helping keep the mixture light and moist.
Milk
Softens the bread into a smooth paste that adds moisture to the mixture.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the chicken mixture.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air in the whites, which lightens the mixture. Stirring or beating it hard knocks out the air and makes the quenelles dense.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, butter, pork, egg, onion, cream, bread):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Pumpkinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, pork, egg, onion, cream, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesChicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipes