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Forcemeat Balls
Chop a quarter of a pound of beef suet, a little lemon-peel, and parsley. Mix with a basin of bread-crumbs, and flavour with pepper, salt, and nutmeg. Moisten with the yolks of two eggs, roll in flour, and make up into small balls. Bake in a hot oven till crisp. This recipe will do for fowls. The addition of a little ham, chopped or pounded, will be found a considerable improvement.
A Victorian all-purpose stuffing mixture, shaped and baked separately rather than packed into the bird. The proportions are loose by design; the one thing to watch is the ratio of fat and egg to crumbs, since too dry a mix will crack and crumble in the oven.
- "A basin of bread-crumbs"Genuinely imprecise, since a basin was whatever size vessel the cook had to hand rather than a fixed measure. Work by feel instead: add crumbs to the chopped suet until you have roughly four parts crumbs to one part fat by volume, around 2 to 2 1/2 cups of fresh crumbs for the quarter pound of suet given.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers or as shredded packet suet in the UK. Shredded suet needs no chopping. Cold grated butter will stand in, though the balls will spread more and taste less savoury.
- "A hot oven"425 to 450F. Small balls the size of a walnut will crisp in 12 to 15 minutes; larger ones need 20. They are done when firm and browned, with the fat rendered out and the outside dry.
- BindingTwo yolks is little enough to bind this quantity. If the mixture will not cohere when squeezed in the palm, add a little more yolk or a spoonful of stock rather than more crumb, which only makes it drier.
- Rolling in flourThe flour coating helps dry the surface, though the crispness comes chiefly from the suet rendering in a hot oven. Note that the recipe flours before shaping ("roll in flour, and make up into small balls"); flouring the shaped balls instead, just before baking, keeps the coating from going pasty.
- Fresh crumbs, not dryNineteenth-century breadcrumbs meant grated stale crumb, soft and irregular. Commercial dry crumbs absorb more moisture and will need extra egg; panko is too coarse.
- The hamTake the suggestion. Two ounces of finely chopped cooked ham, or the same weight of prosciutto trimmings, supplies the salt and depth the mixture otherwise lacks — reduce the added salt accordingly.
- Yield and servingThe quantity given makes about 18 to 20 small balls. Serve them around roast fowl or in the gravy boat; they can be shaped hours ahead and refrigerated, then baked as the bird rests.
Forcemeat is farce anglicised — the French word for stuffing, from the Latin farcire, to stuff — and by the time Cassell's was compiled the term covered any seasoned mixture of chopped fat, crumbs or meat, whether packed into a joint, poached as quenelles, or, as here, rolled and baked as a garnish. Suet, lemon peel, parsley and nutmeg were the standard English quartet for the crumb version, and the same combination turns up in mock turtle soup, in veal stuffings and in the balls served with hare. Forcemeat was treated as a foundation skill, a thing a cook was expected to have by heart and vary at will, which is why the quantities here are given in basins and "a little" rather than in weights.