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Game, Forcemeat For
Take a quarter of a pound each of fat bacon, calf's liver, and finely-grated bread-crumbs. Cut the meat into small pieces, and fry them until half cooked. then chop them small, put them into a mortar, and pound them with the crumbs, a tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, and a pinch of powdered mace. When well pounded, add the well-beaten yolks of two eggs, and if these are not sufficient to bind all together, add a little cream. Time, twenty minutes to prepare. Probable cost, 10d. for this quantity.
A standard Victorian liver-and-bacon forcemeat, meant to be stuffed into a game bird or rolled into balls and cooked alongside the roast. It is a raw-ish paste when you finish it and must be cooked through afterwards.
- The hinge: it is not finished foodThe bacon and liver are deliberately left half cooked, and the egg yolk is raw. Whatever you do with it — stuff a bird, poach quenelles, roll balls to bake in the dripping — it needs to reach 165F/74C in the centre before serving.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound is 4 oz / about 115 g of each of the three main ingredients, so roughly 12 oz of forcemeat in total, enough to stuff a bird or two with some left over for balls, depending on size. "Probable cost, 10d." is ten old pence, pre-decimal sterling.
- Calf's liverStill sold by good butchers, though lamb's or chicken liver substitutes without complaint; chicken liver is milder and smoother. Trim out the tough connective tissue at the hilum before frying or it will show up as strings in the paste.
- Mortar workA food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar was for, but pulse rather than run it — over-processing warms the fat and turns the mixture pasty. If you want the fine, close texture the original is after, push the pounded mixture through a sieve.
- Bread-crumbsFinely grated fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, not dried packaged crumbs, which absorb far more liquid and will make the forcemeat dry and sandy. If you only have dried crumbs, use about two-thirds the weight.
- MaceThe dried outer covering (aril) of the nutmeg, warmer and less sweet. Ground mace is still sold; a pinch of freshly grated nutmeg is the nearest substitute.
- Binding and testingTwo yolks should be enough; add cream a teaspoon at a time only if the mixture crumbles when pressed. Fry a small nugget and taste it before committing — the salt reads differently once the bacon has cooked out.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt against 12 oz of mixture is on the firm side by modern habit, and streaky bacon adds more. Start with half and adjust after the test nugget.
Forcemeat — from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of the older English "farced meat" — was one of the standing preparations of a Victorian kitchen, kept in the repertoire the way a stock or a roux was. It is a component rather than a dish in its own right: the same paste lines a raised pie, stuffs a boned bird, or is rolled into balls and roasted in the fat under the spit. The liver-and-bacon version is specifically for game, the reasoning being that lean, close-grained wild birds need fat and richness supplied from outside; some cooks pounded in the liver of the bird itself when they had it. That such a recipe is costed to the penny reflects the book's audience, households pricing dishes before ordering them.