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Forcemeat of Mushroom
Procure four ounces of young just opened mushrooms. Peel them, cut off the stems, and remove the brown part. Dissolve two ounces of butter in a stewpan, and let them simmer in it very gently over a slow fire, with a slight flavouring of mace and cayenne. Spread them over a dish, placed in a slanting position to drain away the moisture. When cold, mince them, and add four ounces of fine bread-crumbs, a small seasoning of salt, cayenne, mace, and nutmeg, a piece of butter, and the yolks of a couple of eggs to bind. Throw in as much of the mushroom gravy as will make the forcemeat of the proper consistency. It will be greatly improved if the whole mixture be pounded in a mortar. Make into balls, poach, and throw into soup; or fry, and serve round a dish of roast fowls or minced veal. It is also good as a stuffing for boiled fowls, partridges, etc. Time to stew in butter, seven minutes; to poach balls, six minutes; to fry, six or seven minutes.
A Victorian garnish forcemeat — closer to a quenelle than to a bread stuffing — built on the buttery liquor the mushrooms give up. The whole dish hinges on saving that liquor.
- Keep the mushroom butterThe "mushroom gravy" the recipe calls for at the end is the butter and juices left in the stewpan, plus whatever drains off the tilted dish. Pour it into a cup and reserve it; without it the mixture is dry and tastes only of bread.
- Weights and yield4 oz mushrooms is about 115 g, roughly two large handfuls of small button mushrooms; 2 oz butter is 55 g, 4 oz crumbs about 115 g. The recipe gives no yield; expect roughly a dozen walnut-sized balls, enough to garnish a fowl or to float in soup for a few people.
- Breadcrumbs are ambiguous"Fine bread-crumbs" in Victorian cookery generally means fresh crumb of a stale loaf rubbed through a sieve, rather than the dry golden crumbs sold for coating. Dry crumbs absorb far more liquid, so if that is what you have, start with half the weight and add the mushroom liquor by spoonfuls.
- Peeling and the "brown part"Peeling caps is unnecessary with modern cultivated mushrooms. The brown part is the gills, which the original removes to keep the forcemeat pale; leave them in and the mixture goes greyish but tastes stronger.
- Slow fireLow heat, and the seven minutes is not a browning stage. The mushrooms should sweat and release liquid without colouring, or the flavour turns from mushroom to fried mushroom.
- Mace and cayenneMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold ground or as blades; a scant quarter teaspoon ground is a "slight flavouring" here. Cayenne is used in pinches, not spoons.
- PoundingA food processor does quickly what the mortar did by hand. Pulse rather than run it — a smooth paste holds together best, but over-worked bread turns gluey.
- Poaching the ballsBarely simmering salted water or stock, never a rolling boil, which breaks them apart. Six minutes is right for walnut-sized balls; test one by cutting it open before committing the rest. Chilling the shaped balls for twenty minutes first makes them much easier to handle.
- Used as stuffingAs a stuffing for a boiled fowl or partridge, pack it loosely and judge doneness by the bird, not by the forcemeat — the egg yolk sets well before the poultry is cooked through.
"Forcemeat" comes from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of the older English verb "to farce" — to stuff — and by the nineteenth century it covered any bound, pounded mixture, whether it went inside a bird or was rolled into balls and served around it. Forcemeats were treated as foundation work in Victorian cookery writing, with several standard versions — veal, bacon, oyster, herb — to be matched to whatever was being sent up. A meatless mushroom version would have served for fast days and for dishes where a meat forcemeat would have muddied the flavour. The instruction to drain the stewed mushrooms on a slanting dish is characteristic of the period's kitchen economy — the drained liquor comes straight back into the mixture at the end.