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Forcemeat for Fish, Soups, or Stews
Pound the flesh of a medium-sized lobster, half an anchovy, a piece of boiled celery, the yolk of a hard-boiled egg, salt, pepper, and cayenne to taste. Mix these with a tea-cupful of bread-crumbs, two ounces of butter (oiled), and two raw eggs. Make into small balls, and fry a pale brown in butter. Two or three oysters may be added. Probable cost, 3s. to 4s. (See also FORCEMEAT FOR BAKED PIKE.)
A rich lobster quenelle mixture in all but name, meant to be dropped into fish soups and stews or served round a boiled fish. A few Victorian conventions need translating before it will behave.
- Get the binding right firstThe two raw eggs and the crumbs are the only structure here; lobster meat is wet and the mixture can slacken. Chill it for half an hour before shaping and fry one test ball — if it breaks up, work in more crumbs a spoonful at a time rather than another egg.
- "Oiled" butterThis means butter melted until it is clear and liquid, not creamed. Let it cool to barely warm before mixing, or it will begin to set the raw egg.
- A tea-cupfulVictorian teacups were smaller than a modern cup; reckon on something in the region of 5 to 6 fl oz of fresh breadcrumbs, loosely packed. Use fresh crumbs, not dried; dried ones drink too much and give a sandy ball.
- A medium-sized lobsterAbout 1½ lb in the shell, yielding roughly 6 to 8 oz of picked meat. Cooked lobster, whether you boil it yourself or buy it picked, is what a recipe of this date assumes.
- Half an anchovyThat is half a salt-cured fish, so one fillet from a modern tin, or about half a teaspoon of anchovy paste. It is there for depth rather than fishiness, and the salt it carries should be counted before you add more.
- The oystersIf you add them, chop them small and shed the liquor, or they will make the mixture too loose to hold. They cook through in the time the balls take to brown.
- FryingClarified butter in a shallow pan over a moderate heat. "Pale brown" is the instruction -- a hard sear tightens the egg and dries the lobster. Two to three minutes, turning, is enough for a ball the size of a walnut.
- YieldAround 18 to 24 small balls, enough to garnish a tureen of fish soup for six to eight. They are best made the day they are eaten.
- The cost noteThree to four shillings was a substantial sum for a garnish in the 1870s–80s, which tells you this was a dish for a well-provisioned household rather than an everyday economy.
Forcemeat — from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of the older English "farced meat" — was one of the workhorses of the Victorian kitchen, and a dictionary of cookery such as Cassell's gives it a whole run of variations, one for each application. Balls of forcemeat served the same purpose as a modern quenelle or dumpling: they carried flavour into a soup or stew, added substance to a dish that might otherwise be thin, and gave the cook something decorative to arrange round a boiled fish. Lobster forcemeat sits at the luxurious end of that range, and the anchovy in it reflects a long-standing English habit, going back well before this book, of using cured anchovy as a savoury seasoning rather than as a fish in its own right — the same instinct that produced anchovy essence, anchovy butter and the bottled sauces of the period. The cross-reference to forcemeat for baked pike is a reminder that Cassell's was built as a reference work first, meant to be consulted by a cook mid-task rather than read through.