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Forcemeat for Turkey
Take equal quantities of lean veal and pork, and mince them finely together; also cut into pieces a parboiled veal sweetbread, and mix with about three-quarters of a pound of each of the former meats. Add half a pound of bread panada, and the same of warmed butter. Flavour with a little nutmeg, salt, pepper, and half an ounce of grated lemon rind. Bind with three beaten eggs, and fill both crop and body.
A rich Victorian veal-and-pork forcemeat, meant to fill both cavities of a large roasting bird. The quantities are generous by modern standards and the two unfamiliar elements — panada and sweetbread — are what need attention.
- Cook the stuffing to temperature, not to the clockAny forcemeat packed inside a bird must reach 165F/74C at its centre, checked with a probe, and the turkey itself 165F in the thigh. Pack it loosely rather than tight; densely stuffed cavities are the usual reason the middle stays under temperature. Cooking it in a buttered dish alongside the bird is the safer route and gives a better crust.
- Bread panadaNot an ingredient you buy. Simmer crustless white bread with milk or light stock, stirring, until it forms a smooth stiff paste that leaves the side of the pan, then cool it before mixing. The half pound called for is half a pound of the finished paste.
- SweetbreadVeal thymus or pancreas, still sold by good butchers and worth ordering ahead. Soak it in cold water an hour or two, blanch 5 minutes in simmering salted water, cool, then peel off the membrane and any gristle before cutting it up. "Parboiled" here means exactly that blanch, not full cooking.
- Warmed butterHalf a pound of butter melted just to the point of softness, not browned or fully liquid — hot butter will start to cook the eggs and will separate out of the mix. Room-temperature soft butter works as well and is easier to fold in.
- The lemon rindHalf an ounce of grated zest is the zest of roughly two or three lemons, which reads as a great deal but carries the fat. Take only the coloured outer layer; the pith at this quantity would turn the mixture bitter.
- Quantities and yieldThree-quarters of a pound each of veal and pork, plus panada, butter, sweetbread and eggs, gives roughly three pounds of forcemeat — enough for the neck end and body cavity of a large bird, or for a smaller bird with the remainder baked in a separate dish.
- TextureMince the meats twice or pulse in a processor for a fine, close-grained result; the period expectation is a smooth forcemeat, not a coarse sausage stuffing. Fry a teaspoonful and taste before committing the whole batch to the bird, since the raw mixture cannot be sampled.
- OvenIf baking it separately, a moderate oven of 350F/180C in a covered dish for about 45 minutes, uncovered for the last 15, will set it and brown the top.
"Forcemeat" comes through the French farce, from farcir, to stuff, and by the nineteenth century it named a whole family of bound minced mixtures used for stuffings, quenelles and the linings of raised pies. The instruction to "fill both crop and body" reflects the way a large bird was handled in a Victorian kitchen: the loose skin at the neck end, where the crop had been drawn out, was packed as well as the body cavity — though here the same mixture goes into both, and the practice of using a different stuffing at each end was by no means universal. This one is on the grand side — veal, pork, sweetbread, half a pound of butter and a panada thickener — and belongs to the tradition of the delicate pale forcemeat, set against the sausage, chestnut or sage-and-onion mixtures.