My First Meal in Lyon - Quenelles de Brochet
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
- There is nothing like The First Kiss just moments after you realize you’ve fallen in love (with the person you’re kissing of course).
- The older we become the more difficult it is to discover something that we have never tried, or even heard of before.
- When you fall in love or discover something new, completely by surprise, without expecting it, your joy is amplified. There’s nothing quite like a good surprise.
Lyon, similar to Munich but without the annoying Muencheners. With not one but two rivers flowing through it and the Alps at their backdoor.
Lyon,… also like a small Paris but without the annoying Parisians. Basically, if you mixed Munich, the Alps, the river and Paris but then removed boring Muencheners (and their bad food) and Weird Parisians (and their bad attitude), you would have Lyon!
Well, it’s not an exact science but you get the general drift.
So there I was, in Lyon, waxing lyrical about how I, “always knew Lyon would feel just like this!”
And at the moment, that fleeting moment in which I felt myself falling in love with Lyon,…Lyon kissed me.
Tenderly,…with Quenelles de Brochet.
To be precise it was Quenelle de Brochet et Ecrevisses Sauce Nantua
How could something so common to one area in France and so simple have eluded me? I grew up eating dumplings in the US and ate my share of the German dumplings, called Knödel (sometimes made with bread and sometimes with potatoes). I don’t care for German knödel because they are poached and moist. But the quenelles were different.
Quenelles are traditional made with minced fish or meat, eggs, cream and flour and then poached. These quenelles had been poached and then baked in the oven. There is nothing complicated about the tender, velvety dumplings. They are simple and divine.
The original recipe of Lyon’s quenelle is assumed to have been created in 1830, according to Félix BENOIT’s cooking guide (La Cuisine des Traboules). At that time, pikes abounded in the Rhones Alpes region. Thanks to the pastry cook Charles Morateur, who decided to fill a dumpling with flesh of fish, Lyon’s housewives got a new recipe to cook this freshwater fish.
The unflavoured dumpling, simply called quenelle, was mainly eaten during the World War II, provided meat and fish shortages.
After leaving the restaurant, we grabbed an icecream from what must surely be the best icecream place in Lyon and then, in the next shop I found a cookbook, La Cuisine Lyonnaise with the recipe for Quenelle de Brochet (Pike fish) with a Nantua sauce. The problem is, the recipe in this book is confusing and just doesn’t make sense. I really don’t want to post a recipe that I have never tried myself so I looked around on the web and found another food blogger who found herself in a similar predicament. She post an adapted recipe from a cookbook and mentions the Parisian resto, Aux Lyonnais, about which I just read last night on Chocolate & Zucchini. Apparently, at Aux Lyonnais you can get a three-course meal for 35€. That’s good for Paris and even better if they serve amazing quenelles!
If any of you have a strait-forward recipe for Pike Quenelles, I would appreciate your comments 
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