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Forcemeat, Butter
Mix three ounces of butter with four ounces of bread-crumbs; add a large tea-spoonful of finely-chopped parsley, half a tea-spoonful of grated lemon rind, and seasoning of salt and cayenne. Beat up an egg with a tea-spoonful of milk, strain, and moisten the mixture with this. Stir well, and it is ready for use. Probable cost, 9d.
A plain butter-bound stuffing of the sort Cassell's expected a cook to keep in her head. The proportions work as written; only the vessels, the crumbs and the intended use need translating.
- Weights in cupsThree ounces of butter is six tablespoons; four ounces of breadcrumbs is roughly two cups if the crumbs are fresh and loose, closer to one cup if dry and fine. Weigh if you can, since the two behave very differently.
- The crumbsThis means stale white bread grated or rubbed through a sieve, not dried commercial crumbs, which absorb far more moisture and will give a sandy, dense forcemeat. Day-old bread pulsed in a processor and left uncovered for an hour is the right texture.
- Butter softened, not meltedThe point of a butter forcemeat is that the fat stays suspended in the crumb and melts during cooking, keeping the mixture light. Cream the butter to a soft paste and work the crumbs in; melted butter soaks straight through and the result bakes solid.
- Straining the eggThe egg is beaten with a teaspoon of milk and strained to remove the chalazae and any shell, so the binding is even. It is a small step but the reason the finished forcemeat looks smooth rather than streaked with white.
- CayenneCayenne here is a background heat rather than a chilli note. A pinch, no more than an eighth of a teaspoon, is in keeping.
- Yield and useThis makes about a cup and a half, enough to stuff a pair of small fish or to line the cavity of a chicken. A butter-bound forcemeat of this kind suits fish and white meats, where a suet forcemeat would be heavier.
- CookingThe mixture is raw, containing egg, and is meant to be cooked inside or alongside the dish. Stuffing packed into a bird slows the heat considerably; cook until the centre of the stuffing itself reaches 165F, or bake it separately in a buttered dish for 20-25 minutes at 375F.
- That priceNinepence is the book's estimate of what the ingredients would cost at the time of compilation; figures of this kind appear throughout the Dictionary.
Forcemeat comes from the French farce, a stuffing, 'force' being generally taken as an alteration of 'farce', and Victorian cookery books treated it as a whole small family of preparations rather than one recipe: veal forcemeat bound with suet for roast joints, oyster forcemeat for turkey, and lighter butter-bound versions like this one for fish and poultry. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery was arranged alphabetically as a reference work, which is why the stuffings sit together under F, to be looked up and cross-referenced from whatever roast or baked fish sent you there. The choice between suet and butter seems largely to have been a question of what the forcemeat was going with, butter being reserved for delicate dishes where mutton fat would dominate, and the parsley and lemon rind here are often said to be the usual English seasoning for anything from the fishmonger.