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Beef Forcemeat
Take one pound of lean beef, quarter of a pound of beef suet, and half a pound of fat bacon; cut them into small pieces, and add half a tea-spoonful of powdered thyme and marjoram, the same of ground allspice, and half the quantity of pounded mace. Put all into a mortar and pound them to a paste, with two well-beaten eggs. Season with pepper and salt. Probable cost, 1s. 4d.
A raw meat paste meant to be used as stuffing or rolled into balls and cooked with the dish it accompanies, not eaten as it stands. The whole thing succeeds or fails on temperature.
- Keep everything coldFat that warms past about 60F while being worked will smear and the cooked forcemeat will be greasy and crumbly. Chill the beef, suet and bacon hard, and if using a food processor, work in short pulses and return the bowl to the refrigerator if it starts to feel warm.
- Mortar to processorA food processor does in a minute what pounding does in twenty. Grind the meats and fat first to a coarse paste, then add the eggs and seasonings and pulse just until cohesive; over-processing turns it rubbery.
- Fat baconThis most likely means a fat streaky cut, and probably unsmoked, rather than modern lean smoked rashers. Ordinary supermarket bacon will push the salt and smoke further than the recipe seems to intend; green (unsmoked) belly or fresh pork fatback with the salt adjusted by hand is the safer reading.
- Beef suetFresh kidney suet from a butcher is what is wanted. Packaged shredded suet is stabilised with flour and behaves differently; if that is all you can get, it will still bind but the texture is coarser.
- Mace and allspice"Half the quantity of pounded mace" means a quarter teaspoon against the half teaspoon each of thyme, marjoram and allspice. Ground mace is the usual substitute for pounded blade mace.
- Salt by weightThe recipe leaves "pepper and salt" open. For 1 3/4 lb of meat and fat, about 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons of fine salt is in range, less if you are using cured bacon. Fry a teaspoonful of the mixture and taste it before committing the batch.
- CookingWhether used to stuff a joint, poached as quenelles, or rolled into balls and simmered in gravy, take it to 160F throughout. It is raw pork and beef with raw egg in it and is not intended to be tasted uncooked.
- YieldAbout 1 3/4 lb, enough to stuff a large joint or make roughly twenty forcemeat balls. It keeps two days covered in the refrigerator and freezes well raw.
- The cost note"1s. 4d." is one shilling and fourpence. Costings of this kind were given as a guide to household expense; the figure has no bearing on the method.
Forcemeat comes from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of the older English "farced meat" — nothing to do with forcing, though the folk etymology stuck early. A good forcemeat was treated as a foundation the way a stock or a roux was: you made it, then you used it in a dozen places, stuffing a shoulder of veal, binding a raised pie, or dropped in balls around a braise. The heavy proportion of fat to lean and the pounding to a smooth paste are both marks of the older tradition; domestic mincers spread through British kitchens across the later nineteenth century, but a mortar and a strong arm were how you got meat to hold together. The spicing — allspice, mace, thyme and marjoram — is conservative, and would not have looked out of place in a cookery book a century earlier.