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Forcemeat for Turkey (roast)
Take of lean veal, or the flesh of an old fowl, a couple of ounces; free it from skin and sinew. Pound it in a mortar, with two ounces of shredded suet, the same of bread-crumbs, a dessert-spoonful of minced parsley, a large tea-spoonful of lemon-thyme, an onion, and the grated rind of half a lemon. Flavour delicately with pepper and salt, and pound and bind together with two beaten eggs. A richer and better forcemeat is made by the addition of ham, tongue, anchovy, or the minced flesh, without the beards, of a dozen oysters Pork sausage-meat is commonly used to stuff the crop.
A small, dense veal-and-suet forcemeat of the sort Victorian cooks packed into the neck end of a turkey. The quantities are tiny by modern expectations, so read the yield note before you shop.
- Yield and scaleTwo ounces of meat, two of suet and two of crumbs give roughly a cup of forcemeat: enough for a small bird only. For a 12-14 lb turkey, triple everything; the recipe itself notes that pork sausage-meat is commonly used for the crop (neck cavity).
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons; the "large tea-spoonful" of lemon-thyme means a generous teaspoon of leaves stripped from the stem. Lemon thyme is a distinct variety; ordinary thyme plus a little extra lemon zest stands in.
- The onionNo size is given, and no instruction to cook it, so it appears to go in raw. A small onion, chopped fine and softened in a little butter first, will give a milder result.
- SuetShredded beef suet from a butcher, chilled hard, is what is wanted; packet shredded suet works. It melts during roasting and keeps the mixture moist, which is why simply swapping in oil does not work. Very cold butter, diced small, is the nearest substitute.
- Bread-crumbs by weightTwo ounces is about a cup of soft fresh crumbs, or half that volume if you use dry ones. Dry crumbs will absorb more egg and give a firmer, more sliceable forcemeat.
- Mortar workThe pounding is there to make a paste, not a mince. A food processor does it in under a minute: pulse the meat and suet to a paste first, then add crumbs, herbs and egg and pulse only to combine, or the texture turns rubbery.
- OystersThe "beard" is the frilly gill fringe, which is tough and best trimmed. A dozen oysters adds a good deal of moisture, so you may need less egg; oyster forcemeat will not keep -- make it the day you roast.
- Cooking safelyWhether packed into the crop or rolled into balls and baked alongside, the forcemeat contains raw veal or fowl and raw egg and must reach 165F at its centre. Stuffing a bird slows the roast; check the stuffing with a thermometer, not the clock.
"Forcemeat" comes from the French farce, a stuffing, and by the time Cassell's was compiling its dictionary a common English practice for a roast turkey was sausage-meat in the crop at the neck end, and a finer pounded forcemeat - veal, suet, crumbs, lemon and herbs - in the body, though other Victorian books place the pounded forcemeat at the neck. The instruction to use "the flesh of an old fowl" as an alternative to veal is a reminder of a poultry economy in which laying hens eventually went into the pot rather than being thrown away, and their tough, well-flavoured meat was exactly right for pounding. The list of enrichments - ham, tongue, anchovy, oysters - is characteristic of nineteenth-century British cooking, where anchovy and oyster served as savoury seasonings rather than featured ingredients; oysters were then cheap enough in Britain to be used by the dozen in a stuffing, a use that reads as extravagance only because the beds were later fished out.