In the quenelles club: Hong Kong bistro chef champions tricky fish dish
Notoriously difficult to make, pike quenelles has dropped off menus in France, but Mischa Moselle finds one chef who has brought the dish from a Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris to a Hong Kong bistro
Toothy pike from France's river Rhone look like a vicious relic of the dinosaur era. The classic French bistro dish they star in, quenelles de brochet (or, more prosaically, pike dumplings) is fast becoming a relic on restaurant menus. But the recipe has found a champion in chef Emmanuel Xu Zhao of Scarlett Cafe & Wine Bar in Tsim Sha Tsui.
It's probably easier to understand why the dish has come off so many menus than how it has tenaciously clung on in just a few spots. As Zhao has not found a suitable Asian substitute for the fish, he has to import it from France, which means predicting demand two weeks ahead of time. The fish arrives whole and has to be filleted. As a typical river fish, pike are extremely bony, with plenty of small bones running through the flesh, much like the marbling in good beef. It takes many hours to turn the ugly fish into a fillet ready for processing.
Then there's the recipe itself.
Recipe book writer Julia Child's instructions end with a section captioned "In case of disaster". Back when the dish was created, some poor Lyonnais chef would have found himself pounding the fish to a purée in a pestle and mortar, along with kidney or veal suet. In Child's classic book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the fish has to be passed through a mincer - twice - before the other ingredients are beaten in with a wooden spoon. If you insist on using a blender, you have to make sure the fish doesn't get warmed by the heat of the motor.
Child starts with a classic choux pastry made from water, butter, flour, salt and eggs, before mixing in the fish, seasoned with nutmeg or even truffle, before the final addition of cream. The next step is to poach one oval-shaped dumpling as a test, forming it with two wet spoons. Even for a competent, keen amateur cook, this takes a surprising amount of manual dexterity. Of course, here you find that one dumpling works, so you try five and Child's disaster strikes and they collapse. Child's solution is to turn the rest of the mix into a fish mousse or souffle - probably acceptable to your dinner guest friends but hardly realistic in a restaurant.