Home › The Principles of Cookery › Forcemeat for Cold Pasties
Forcemeat for Cold Pasties
For savoury pasties, to be eaten cold, use a forcemeat of fowl--and old fowl will answer this purpose. Strip off the skin, and clear the flesh from the bones; pound the meat in a mortar; soak some white bread in milk, squeeze it dry, and rub with it three ounces of butter, in the proportion of half a pound of bread to this quantity; add the meat, with a flavouring of nutmeg and salt. Bind with four yolks of eggs, and make up into balls for pasties or soups. A little ham, cut into thin slices and rolled round the balls separately, is a great improvement to a white meat pasty. For game or beef pasties use pork, game, or liver. If parsley is liked, some may be minced and pounded with the meat.
A panade-bound poultry forcemeat, shaped into balls to sit inside a raised pie or pasty. The original gives ratios rather than a fixed quantity, so a little judgement is required.
- The proportions are incompleteHalf a pound of bread to three ounces of butter is stated, but no weight is given for the meat. A workable reading is equal weights of pounded meat and squeezed panade; anything more bread than that gives a stodgy ball.
- "An old fowl"A retired laying hen, tough and deeply flavoured, sold today as a stewing hen or boiling fowl. Skinless boneless chicken thighs are the closest supermarket substitute and give a moister forcemeat than breast.
- Mortar workA food processor does in moments what the mortar did by hand over a much longer stretch. Pulse rather than run it continuously, and keep the meat cold, or the fat smears and the mixture turns pasty.
- Squeeze the bread properlyWring the milk-soaked bread in a cloth until it stops dripping. Wet panade is the usual reason forcemeat balls collapse in the oven or fall apart in soup.
- Cooking temperatureThese go into the pasty raw and cook with it. Whether baked in a pie or poached in stock, the balls need to reach 74C/165F at the centre before they are safe to eat cold.
- Test before you commitFry a teaspoon of the mixture and taste it for salt and nutmeg. Raw forcemeat tastes flatter than cooked, and nutmeg intensifies; a quarter teaspoon grated into a pound of mixture is plenty.
- The ham wrappingCut the ham as thin as you can and wrap each ball completely, overlapping the edges. It bastes the ball and holds its shape, which matters more in a cold pasty where the forcemeat is sliced through.
- YieldHalf a pound of bread with a matching weight of meat gives roughly two dozen walnut-sized balls; how far that goes depends on the size of the pies.
Forcemeat -- generally taken to derive from the French farce, a stuffing, with the English form suggesting instead the forcing of meat into a cavity -- was a staple of the Victorian kitchen precisely because it stretched expensive protein with cheap bread and made the toughest bird useful. The recipe treats forcemeat as a technique to be varied by dish: fowl for white pasties, pork or liver for game and beef, the same panade and egg-yolk binding throughout. Cold savoury pasties and raised pies of this kind were travelling and picnic food, and also cold-larder food in houses without refrigeration, which is why the recipe assumes the balls will be eaten firm and sliced rather than hot and soft. The instruction to keep an old fowl for the purpose reflects a period when hens were kept for eggs first and eaten only when they stopped laying, by which point stewing or pounding were the only kind treatments left.