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Potage De Quenelles a LA Marie Louise

A French soup of bread-based quenelles simmered in consommé with peas and cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Potage De Quenelles a LA Marie Louise

Ingredients

Directions

Make the quenelle paste

  1. Soak the diced French roll in milk until absorbed.

  2. Melt butter in a stewpan, add soaked bread, salt, pepper, and nutmeg; stir over heat to dry for a few minutes.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then mix in cream and egg yolks.

  4. In another pan, melt butter, add flour, and enough cream to form a delicate paste; dry for a few minutes.

  5. Mix the paste with the bread mixture, add cheese, pepper, and nutmeg.

Poach the quenelles

  1. Poach a small quenelle in consommé to test; if correct, shape into quenelles using teaspoons.

  2. Poach the quenelles in a sauté pan with consommé.

Serve

  1. In a separate pot, boil peas in remaining consommé, add parsley and sugar, then serve with quenelles.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

French roll
Soaked in milk, it forms the bulk of the quenelle paste and gives it body.
Egg yolks
Bind the mixture and set when poached, giving the quenelles structure and richness.
Flour
Cooked in butter into a paste that thickens and stabilises the quenelle mixture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour through the paste.
Consommé
Poaching liquid that cooks the quenelles and carries flavour into them.
Peas
Provide the sweet, fresh vegetable base of the soup.

The step that matters

Test a small quenelle before shaping the rest. The paste must hold its shape and not break apart in the hot consommé. Poaching a test quenelle shows whether the binding is correct 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.

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