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Forcemeat of Beef
Take cold mashed potato, some slices of beef minced fine, a few savoury herbs, pepper, and salt. Mix these with two eggs to a paste. Make into balls. Fry in butter a rich brown. Garnish with fried parsley.
A Victorian way of using up Monday's cold roast and leftover mash. The method is sound; what it lacks is proportions, so treat the list as a ratio problem before anything else.
- ProportionsThe original gives no quantities. A workable balance is roughly equal weights of cold mashed potato and finely minced cooked beef — say 8 oz of each. The recipe calls for two eggs; in that volume the paste may come out slack, so consider starting with one and adding the second only if the mixture will not bind.
- "Forcemeat" hereForcemeat generally means a stuffing mixture, but this version is shaped and fried on its own, which puts it closer to a croquette or rissole. It could equally be used to stuff a marrow or to pad out a shepherd's pie.
- The beefThis wants cold cooked beef from a roast or boiled joint, minced or chopped fine, not raw mince. Raw beef would release liquid and slacken the paste, and the short frying time is not enough to cook it through.
- "Savoury herbs"Parsley, thyme and marjoram are the usual candidates, with a scrape of onion or a little grated lemon rind if the beef is bland. About a tablespoon of chopped fresh herbs to a pound of mixture.
- Getting a rich brownPlain butter burns before the balls colour properly. Use clarified butter, or half butter and half a neutral oil, at a moderate frying heat, and turn the balls so they brown on all sides — about four minutes in total, since everything inside is already cooked.
- Firming the pasteChill the shaped balls for half an hour before frying. Cold potato paste holds together far better in hot fat, and a light roll in flour or dry breadcrumbs gives a crust the mixture cannot make on its own.
- Fried parsleyThe parsley must be bone dry or the fat will spit violently. Drop dry sprigs into hot fat for five to ten seconds only — they should stay bright green and go crisp; longer and they blacken and turn bitter.
- YieldA pound of mixture makes a dozen or more walnut-sized balls, enough for four as a light supper dish with a sharp sauce or a spoonful of gravy.
Recipes like this belong to the great Victorian literature of re-cooked meat — the branch of household cookery that dealt with what to do on Tuesday with Sunday's joint. Victorian household manuals devoted long sections to rissoles, croquettes, hashes and mince, because in a coal-fired kitchen a large roast was economical to cook once and wasteful to throw away. The word forcemeat comes from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of the verb to farce or stuff, and by the nineteenth century it covered any bound, seasoned meat paste whether it went inside something or was fried on its own. The potato base marks this as a plainer, more domestic descendant of the older forcemeats, which were bound with suet and breadcrumbs; mashed potato was cheaper, and already in the larder.