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Fish, Forcemeat For
Chop the remains of any shell-fish--lobster, crab, etc.--with the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs; add a little minced parsley, and the same quantity of bread-crumbs as of fish. Pound all in a mortar, with two ounces of butter, a tea-spoonful of salt, half the quantity of pepper, and a flavouring of nutmeg. Stuff any white fish with this forcemeat, mixing it well with the beaten yolk of an egg. (See also OYSTERS, FORCEMEAT OF.)
A proportional recipe rather than a measured one: the only fixed quantities are the butter, seasoning and eggs, and everything else follows the amount of shellfish you have left over.
- Work out the scale firstRead it as equal volumes of picked shellfish meat and fresh breadcrumbs, seasoned with 2 oz (55 g) butter, 1 teaspoon salt and half a teaspoon of pepper. That salt figure suits roughly a pound of total mixture; with a cupful of scraps it will be aggressively salty, so season by taste.
- The salt is the hingeCrab and lobster are already saline, so a full teaspoon can easily overshoot a small batch. Start with a quarter teaspoon, pound the mixture, taste, and correct.
- Mortar or processorA few pulses in a food processor does what the mortar did, but stop while some texture remains. Pounded to a smooth paste the forcemeat turns pasty and dense once baked.
- BreadcrumbsFresh crumbs from a day-old white loaf, not dried packaged crumbs, which absorb far more moisture and will make the stuffing dry and sandy.
- The egg yolkThe final beaten yolk is the binder, added at the point of stuffing rather than during pounding. Without it the mixture crumbles out of the cavity in the oven.
- Leftover shellfish"The remains of any shell-fish" assumed a cold larder and same-day cooking. Use cooked lobster or crab meat that has been continuously refrigerated and is no more than a day or two old; picked crab meat spoils quickly and off notes are not masked by nutmeg.
- Cooking the stuffed fishNo oven is specified. A whole stuffed white fish -- bass, haddock, grey mullet -- bakes well at 350-375F (180-190C). The fish should reach 145F (63C) at the thickest point, and the stuffing, which heats slowest, is usually taken to 165F (74C); generally 25-40 minutes depending on size.
- YieldA pound of shellfish scraps plus an equal volume of crumbs makes enough to stuff a 3-4 lb whole fish, serving four to six. Surplus can be rolled into small balls and baked alongside.
Forcemeat -- from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of the older English "farced meat" -- was one of the workhorses of the nineteenth-century kitchen, and cookery dictionaries like Cassell's carried numerous versions indexed by what they were meant to fill. This one belongs squarely to the economy side of the Victorian household: lobster and crab were expensive, picked over at table, and the shell fragments and clinging meat that remained were far too valuable to throw out. Pounding scraps with butter and crumbs in a mortar turned them into something that could dress a cheaper whole white fish and carry the flavour of the costly one through a second meal. The nutmeg is a period signature; grated nutmeg was used with fish and shellfish in British cooking well into the twentieth century, a habit generally traced back to the spice-heavy sauces of earlier centuries and only slowly abandoned. A cross-reference to oyster forcemeat sits alongside it, one of the family of stuffings the same kitchen would have known.