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Forcemeat of Sausage
Prepare one pound of sausage-meat, in the proportion of two parts of lean pork to one of fat. Take this and an equal quantity of bread-crumbs; add two ounces of butter, a seasoning of salt, pepper, and a small salt-spoonful of mace. Pound all together in a mortar, and bind with the yolks of a couple of eggs.
A plain pork stuffing of the kind Victorian kitchens made by the pound and used in everything from boned poultry to veal olives. The measurements are by weight, which matters more here than anywhere else in the recipe.
- Equal quantity means equal weightEqual quantity most likely means equal weight -- a pound of breadcrumbs to a pound of sausage-meat, which sounds enormous, and by volume it is: roughly eight to ten cups of fresh crumbs. Weigh them. Use fresh soft crumbs from a day-old loaf rather than dried packaged crumbs, which drink up the moisture.
- Sausage-meat here is unseasonedThe cook prepares it herself, two parts lean pork to one part fat, and does the seasoning, so the mince is assumed plain. Butcher's sausage-meat was often already seasoned, and modern bulk breakfast sausage is salted and spiced; if you use it, cut the added salt sharply and drop the mace to a pinch. Coarse-ground pork shoulder with its own fat is closer to the original.
- A saltspoonfulAbout a quarter teaspoon. Mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself; ground mace loses its perfume fast, so buy small quantities.
- The mortarThe pounding is what turns the mixture from a crumbly mince into something that slices. A food processor does it in fifteen to twenty seconds of pulsing — stop while there is still visible texture, or the fat smears and the forcemeat turns pasty.
- Keep everything coldButter and pork fat both need to stay firm through the pounding. Chill the meat and cube the butter straight from the refrigerator; if the mixture starts to look greasy or slick, refrigerate it for twenty minutes before going on.
- YieldAround two and a quarter pounds, enough to stuff a large chicken or a boned shoulder of veal with plenty over. It halves without trouble.
- Cook it throughThe eggs and pork are both raw and the mixture is dense, so a stuffing packed into a bird needs to reach 165F at its centre — check the stuffing itself, not just the meat. Rolled into balls and baked at 375F it takes about 25 minutes. Do not taste to check the seasoning until it is cooked; fry off a small spoonful instead.
Forcemeat comes from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of the older English farce-meat — the English verb "force" in this sense being itself an alteration of "farce". In a Victorian kitchen forcemeat was less a recipe than a building block: cookery references list a range of variants (veal, oyster, liver, chestnut) precisely because the cook was expected to master the type and then choose the version that suited the joint. The sausage version was the workhorse, cheap and robust, used for stuffing boned birds, and rolled into balls to garnish a roast — the ancestor of the stuffing balls still sold at British butchers. The instruction to buy sausage-meat as plain minced pork in a set lean-to-fat ratio is a reminder that seasoning was the cook's job, not the butcher's, and that a household could specify its own proportions at the counter.