Pike Quenelles with Sauce Nantua (Quenelles de Brochet, Sauce Nantua)

// SUPPLY LIST

// OPERATIONS

1. 1 Make the panade first, ideally the day before. In a 20 cm heavy-based saucepan bring 250 ml of the milk with 80 g of the cold diced butter, 5 g of the salt and about 15 rasps of nutmeg to a full rolling boil, 100 °C / 212 °F, over medium heat. Pull the pan off the heat, tip in 150 g of the flour in one go and beat hard with a wooden spoon until there is not a lump left, then set it back over low heat and dry the paste for 3-4 minutes, turning it constantly, until it balls around the spoon, pulls cleanly away from the sides and leaves a thin matte film on the base of the pan. An under-dried panade is the single commonest cause of quenelles that spread into rags in the poaching water, so keep working it until it feels heavy and slightly waxy rather than sticky.
2. 2 Spread the panade about 1 cm thick on a cold baking tray, press cling film directly onto the surface so it cannot skin, and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight until it is cold right through, 4 °C / 39 °F. It has to be properly cold, not merely cool: warm panade melts the butter you are about to beat into it and the forcemeat breaks. You will have about 450 g of panade and need 400 g, so the trimmings are your margin for error.
3. 3 If your crayfish are alive, put them in the freezer for 20 minutes to sedate them first. Heat the 2 tbsp of oil in a 28 cm stainless or heavy sauté pan over high heat until it shimmers, add the crayfish in a single layer and cook, tossing, for 3-4 minutes, until every shell has turned scarlet and the pan smells sweet and toasted. Tip them into a bowl and, once cool enough to handle, twist off the tails, peel them and pull out the dark intestinal thread: refrigerate the 12 best tails whole for the garnish and roughly chop the rest to fold into the sauce at the end. Keep every head, claw and scrap of shell, because that is where the sauce lives.
4. 4 Crush the heads and shells roughly with the end of a rolling pin, return them to the same pan over medium heat with the diced carrot and sliced shallots, and sweat for 5 minutes until the vegetables soften without taking colour, then stir in the tomato purée and fry for 1 minute until it darkens to brick red. Pour in the cognac and let it flame or simply boil away for 30 seconds, add the white wine and reduce by half, then add all 700 ml of the fish stock and the tarragon, bring to a bare simmer at about 90 °C / 195 °F and cook uncovered for 30 minutes. Strain through a fine sieve set over a bowl, pressing hard on the shells with a ladle to force through every last drop: you want around 450 ml of vivid orange liquid, and you keep both that and the pressed shells. Do not let it boil hard or run past 30 minutes, as crustacean shells turn muddy and faintly bitter with long, rough cooking.
5. 5 For the beurre d'écrevisses, blitz the pressed shells with the 200 g of cold diced butter in a food processor for 2 minutes to a coarse coral paste, scrape it into a small pan and melt it over the lowest heat you can hold, keeping it at about 55 °C / 130 °F for 20 minutes. Never let it bubble: boiling browns the butter, turns the colour from coral to brick and makes it bitter. Pour the melted butter through a double layer of muslin into a bowl of iced water, leave 20 minutes until it sets as an orange cake on the surface, lift it off, pat it dry and refrigerate until firm. You should have roughly 140 g of hard coral butter.
6. 6 Put the pike cubes, straight from the fridge at 4 °C / 39 °F or colder, in a food processor with 9 g of the salt, the ground white pepper and a few rasps of nutmeg, and blitz for 60-90 seconds to a smooth, tacky paste that clings to the blade. Now push that plain pike paste through a drum sieve, or the finest sieve you own, in tablespoon batches with a plastic scraper, and discard what stays behind. Sieve the fish alone and sieve it now, before any butter or egg goes in: pike carries forked intermuscular bones that cannot be pulled with tweezers and that a processor only splinters, and a finished butter-rich forcemeat is both far harder to force through and warms and breaks under the friction. If you are using whiting or haddock instead, sieve anyway, because it is also what makes the texture silky.
7. 7 Return the sieved pike paste to the cold processor bowl and add 400 g of the cold panade in four pieces, blitzing until uniform, then the 200 g of pomade butter, and finally the eggs one at a time and the extra white, running the machine only 20 seconds between each and stopping the moment the mixture is pale, glossy and holds a soft peak on the blade. The eggs go in last so you can read the consistency as it loosens and stop at the right point. Temperature is the whole game: set the bowl over ice if the mixture ever climbs above 12 °C / 54 °F, or the butter breaks out and the quenelles bake greasy. Scrape into a bowl, cover, and chill at least 2 hours until firm enough to hold the mark of a spoon. The older bouchon version swaps the butter for beef kidney suet, but butter is the Lyonnais restaurant standard and what these proportions are built on.
8. 8 Shape one small test quenelle of about 30 g with two teaspoons and poach it in a small pan of salted water held at 80 °C / 175 °F for 5 minutes: it should swell, float and feel springy. If it flattens and frays, beat another cold egg white into the mixture; if it is dense and rubbery, beat in 20 g of soft butter and 1 tbsp of cold milk. Then shape the rest with two large soup spoons dipped in hot water, passing the mixture from spoon to spoon three times to make smooth three-sided ovals of about 90 g, and set them on a lightly floured tray as you go. You want 12, two per person, from roughly 1.1 kg of forcemeat.
9. 9 Fill a wide shallow pan or a deep roasting tin with about 5 litres of water salted at 10 g per litre and bring it to 80-85 °C / 175-185 °F, where the surface shivers and steams but no bubble ever breaks it. Slide the quenelles in with a spatula, no more than six at a time and never touching, and poach for 14-18 minutes, turning them once at the halfway point with a slotted spoon. They are ready when they have swollen to nearly double, roll over easily, feel springy rather than soft in the middle, and a skewer pushed into the centre comes out clean and warm against your lip. Do not let the water boil at any moment: a rolling boil tears the skin open and empties the quenelle into the pan.
10. 10 Lift the quenelles onto a tray lined with a clean tea towel, cool them for 15 minutes, then refrigerate uncovered at 4 °C / 39 °F for at least 1 hour and up to 24 hours. This rest is not a convenience, it is structural: a cold, drained, settled quenelle swells cleanly and evenly in the oven, while a warm one goes in already relaxed and slumps under the sauce.
11. 11 Boil the strained crayfish liquid in a wide pan over high heat for about 10-12 minutes, until it has reduced from roughly 450 ml to about 250 ml and tastes sweet and concentrated rather than thin. In a 20 cm heavy saucepan melt the remaining 50 g of butter over medium-low heat, whisk in the remaining 50 g of flour and cook the roux for 2 minutes, until it smells of warm biscuit but is still blond, then whisk in the remaining 400 ml of milk a little at a time and simmer gently at about 90 °C / 195 °F for 10 minutes, whisking often, until it thickly coats the back of a spoon. Whisk in the reduced crayfish liquid and the cream, simmer 5 minutes more, then take the pan right off the heat and whisk in the cold crayfish butter in three pieces until the sauce is coral and glossy: off the heat, always, because crayfish butter whisked into a simmering sauce splits and the colour goes grey. Stir in the chopped crayfish tails, season with salt and a pinch of cayenne, and leave it distinctly looser than a sauce you would serve as it is, because the quenelles will drink a third of it in the oven.
12. 12 Heat the oven to 200 °C / 400 °F (fan 180 °C / 350 °F). Butter two 30 x 20 cm gratin dishes, or one large dish of about 40 x 28 cm, and spoon a thin film of sauce into each. Lay the 12 chilled quenelles in with at least 2 cm of clear space around every one, six to a dish, because they double again in the heat and any that touch will fuse into a single raft: crowding them into one small dish is the classic way to ruin the last step of a two-day job. Nap them generously with the rest of the sauce, scatter over the reserved whole crayfish tails, and bake for 18-22 minutes, until the quenelles have risen into high domed cushions, their tips are just catching gold, and the sauce is bubbling lazily around the edges.
13. 13 Rest the dish for 5 minutes out of the oven so the puff settles and the sauce thickens enough to cling to a spoon, then serve straight from the gratin dish, two quenelles a head, with plain steamed rice or boiled new potatoes to catch the sauce and nothing else on the plate. A cold, taut white from the same country, Roussette du Bugey, Mâcon-Villages or Saint-Véran, is the local answer, and a green salad afterwards in the Lyonnais way, not alongside.

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