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Forcemeat of Liver
To one pound of calf's liver allow a quarter of a pound of fat bacon; chop them both separately. Stew in butter, but do not brown, a shallot, an onion, and, if liked, a small clove of garlic. Cover the stewpan until these are tender. Press out the moisture from some bread which has been soaked in water, and add it to the butter in the pan; stir it to a stiff paste, adding more butter if required. Remove the paste to a mortar, and pound it with the chopped liver, etc., a couple of eggs beaten without the whites, a small quantity of allspice or nutmeg, pepper, and salt. When well pounded together, pass the forcemeat through a wire sieve.
A classic panade-based liver forcemeat, meant as a stuffing or the base of a terrine rather than a dish on its own. The instructions assume a mortar and a hair sieve; a food processor does the same work in a fraction of the time.
- "Eggs beaten without the whites"This means yolks only — use two egg yolks, beaten. The whites are omitted because they set firm and rubbery; the yolks bind and enrich without tightening the mixture.
- The bread is a panadeThe recipe says only "some bread," soaked and squeezed dry; two or three slices of stale white bread is a reasonable working amount. Working it into the butter until it forms a stiff paste is what keeps the forcemeat moist rather than crumbly, so do not skip the stirring stage.
- Fat baconUnsmoked fat is the safer choice here: green streaky bacon, fat salt pork, or plain pork back fat. Modern heavily smoked, sugar-cured bacon will tend to dominate the liver; if that is all you have, blanch it in water for a minute first.
- Do not brown the aromaticsThe shallot, onion and garlic are sweated covered until soft and pale. Browning gives a bitter edge that becomes very noticeable once the mixture is pounded smooth.
- Mortar and sievePulse everything in a food processor, then push it through a fine-mesh sieve with a rubber spatula or the back of a ladle. The sieving is not fussiness — it catches the tough connective tissue and membrane from the liver, which is the difference between a silky forcemeat and a gritty one.
- Seasoning"A small quantity" of allspice or nutmeg means about a quarter teaspoon per pound of liver; be freer with salt, roughly a teaspoon, since forcemeat tastes flat when underseasoned. Fry a teaspoonful in butter to check before committing.
- It is a raw preparationOnly the aromatics and the panade have been cooked. Whatever the forcemeat goes into — a stuffing, a terrine, quenelles, a galantine — must be cooked through at the centre; 165F/74C is the usual figure for stuffing inside a bird.
- Yield and keepingA pound of liver gives roughly 1 1/2 lb of forcemeat, enough to stuff a large bird or fill a 1 lb terrine mould. Use it within a day; liver oxidises quickly and turns metallic.
Forcemeat — from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of the older English "farced meat" — was one of the workhorse preparations of the nineteenth-century kitchen, and such books treat it as a technique to be learned rather than a dish to be served. A cook who could make a good forcemeat could stuff a fowl, line a raised pie, bind a galantine or poach quenelles from the same bowl. The liver version, thickened with a bread panade and enriched with pork fat, is close kin to the country pâté and the liver gratin forcemeats of French charcuterie; calf's liver was the genteel choice, being milder and paler than ox liver, and dearer. The mortar and the wire sieve were the usual route to a fine texture in a domestic kitchen, and instructions to pass forcemeat through a sieve are common in period recipes for anything that aspired to smoothness.