Home › The Principles of Cookery › Forcemeat for Meat Pies or Ragouts
Forcemeat for Meat Pies or Ragouts
Take a quarter of a pound of ham, the same of cold veal, and of beef suet, a small onion or two, some parsley, cayenne, salt, and a very little lemon-peel, with half a pint of bread-crumbs. Pound all together in a mortar (previously chopping the meat). Form the forcemeat into a mass with two raw eggs. The flavour may be varied according to taste; an anchovy or oysters may be added, if liked. Time, about one hour to prepare. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A standard Victorian binding forcemeat: cured meat, cooked meat, hard fat, crumbs, egg. It is a component rather than a dish, and it succeeds or fails on texture.
- The hinge: pound cold, cook hotThe suet and meat must stay cold while you work them, or the fat smears and the finished forcemeat is greasy rather than light. A food processor does the mortar's job in short pulses, but chill the bowl and blade first and stop while there is still some texture. However it is used, the forcemeat contains raw egg and needs to reach 165F/74C in the pie or ragout.
- Half a pint of bread-crumbsAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 10 fl oz by volume, about 1¼ US cups of soft fresh crumbs (roughly 2 oz / 60 g). Fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, not dry packaged crumb, which will drink too much egg.
- Beef suetFresh beef suet from a butcher, grated hard from the refrigerator, is the intended fat. Packaged shredded suet works. Cold unsalted butter or fatty pork back fat are the usual stand-ins, pork fat giving the closer result.
- Cold vealLeftover roast veal is the assumption of a household that roasted joints. Cooked chicken thigh or cooked pork shoulder substitutes without complaint; avoid anything dry, such as cooked breast meat.
- SaltA quarter pound of ham brings its own salt, and the cayenne carries further than pepper. Season lightly, then fry a teaspoonful of the mixture and taste before committing the whole batch.
- Lemon-peel"A very little" means the yellow zest only, finely grated, about a quarter teaspoon. Any pith turns bitter under pounding.
- Anchovy or oystersOne or two anchovy fillets, mashed, replace some of the salt and add depth. If using oysters, chop them and fold them in at the end rather than pounding them, and reduce nothing else — they add liquid, so the mixture may need a spoonful more crumb.
- Yield and useRoughly 1¼ lb / 550 g, enough to line or layer a two-crust meat pie for six, or to roll into a dozen small balls to poach in the gravy of a ragout for 8 o kekeeps two days refrigerated and freezes well raw.
- Probable cost1s. 6d. is eighteen pence in pre-decimal money — a modest sum, but not trivial in a book aimed at households counting pennies, which is why the recipe is built around cold roast meat already paid for.
Forcemeat comes from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of the older English "farced meat"; the spelling drifted toward "force" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and stuck. A Victorian cook was expected to keep a few base preparations in her head and deploy them across many dishes — the same pounded mixture lines a veal-and-ham pie, weights out a ragout as small balls, or stuffs a boned bird. The reliance on cold cooked veal and a quarter-pound of ham is the economy of a house that roasted large joints and expected the remains to reappear transformed, and the optional anchovy or oysters reflect a period in which both were familiar English larder savouries. Pounding in a mortar was the usual way to get a close-grained texture before mechanical mincers became common in the domestic kitchen in the later nineteenth century, and the recipe budgets a full hour of preparation.