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Forcemeat for Pigeons
Stir two ounces of butter till it is almost a cream; blend with it four ounces of grated bread-crumbs, add a little parsley minced fine, lemon-peel, and nutmeg grated, with salt and pepper to taste. Bind with one beaten egg. Probable cost. 6d.
A plain butter-and-crumb stuffing of the sort Victorian kitchens kept on hand for small game birds. The proportions are sound; only the crumb and the seasoning quantities need translating.
- Weights in cupsTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons (half a stick). Four ounces of grated breadcrumbs is roughly 2 cups of fresh crumbs, more like 1 cup if you use dry ones.
- Use fresh crumbs, not packaged"Grated bread-crumbs" meant a stale crumb rubbed on a grater, coarse and dry-edged but not toasted. Commercial dried crumbs absorb far more butter and egg and give a pasty result; grate or pulse day-old bread instead.
- The hinge: cream the butter firstThe instruction to stir the butter "till it is almost a cream" is what makes this work. Softened, aerated butter coats the crumbs so the stuffing stays light; melted butter soaks through and the forcemeat bakes into a dense plug.
- Lemon-peel means zest onlyGrate the yellow outer rind of about half a lemon and no white pith. A grating of nutmeg is about an eighth of a teaspoon; period recipes often use it more freely than modern ones.
- Egg as binderOne egg for this quantity gives a stuffing that just holds together. If the mixture will not clump when pressed, add a spoonful of stock rather than a second egg, which turns it rubbery.
- YieldEnough for perhaps four pigeons, depending how loosely it is packed. Any surplus can be rolled into small balls and roasted alongside the birds for about 15 minutes.
- Cooking throughStuffing packed inside a bird slows the heat. Pack it loosely and check the centre reaches 165F, or bake the forcemeat separately in a buttered dish at 350F for 20-25 minutes and serve it under the birds.
- That "probable cost"Sixpence was the estimate for the forcemeat alone, not the pigeons. The dictionary gave a probable cost for most entries so a housekeeper could budget a menu at a glance.
Forcemeat -- from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of the older English "farced meat" -- was a standing item in the Victorian kitchen rather than a dish in itself, and cookery dictionaries like Cassell's carried numerous versions keyed to what they were going into: veal, hare, turkey, fish, pigeons. Pigeon was cheap, plentiful and lean, and a small bird with almost no fat needs something rich in its cavity to keep the breast from drying; butter, crumbs and egg did that job at a fraction of the cost of the veal-and-suet forcemeats used for larger roasts. The parsley, lemon peel and nutmeg trio is the standard English savoury seasoning of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nutmeg then being a routine kitchen spice rather than a Christmas one.