Home › The Principles of Cookery › Gratin
Gratin
Gratin is a French forcemeat. It may be made either of the lean part of veal or the breast and wings of a fowl. Take a calf's udder, and boil it gently, with as much water as will cover it, until sufficiently cooked. Let it cool, cut away all the upper part, and divide the rest into small pieces, which must be pounded in a mortar until they can be passed through a coarse sieve. Take equal parts of veal and cooked liver, cut them into small pieces, and put them in a saucepan with a little salt and pepper, and a table-spoonful of savoury herbs, powdered. Fry them in a little butter for ten minutes, then mince finely, and pound the meat until perfectly smooth, with half the quantity of veal udder. If necessary, butter may be substituted for the udder. Pound all thoroughly, and, whilst pounding, add three raw eggs at different times. Make up a small ball of the forcemeat, and throw it into boiling water, to try whether it is light and properly seasoned. If it be too firm, add a little water; if too soft, another egg. Probable cost of veal, 1s. per pound. The term "au gratin" is applied to certain dishes, covered with sauce and breadcrumbs, and browned in the oven, which are generally served in the earthenware utensils in which they have been baked or otherwise cooked.
This is farce à gratin, the liver-based forcemeat used to line pâté moulds, stuff birds and spread on croûtons under roast game — not a baked, cheese-topped gratin, as the final sentence of the entry acknowledges. Most of the work translates directly; only the fat needs rethinking.
- The test ball is the hingePoaching a walnut of the mixture before you commit is the whole technique, and it still works. Too firm means dry forcemeat once baked, too slack means it will weep fat and collapse; adjust with a spoonful of water or one more egg and test again.
- Calf's udderPounded udder was used as a soft fat in fine nineteenth-century forcemeats and is effectively unobtainable now. Fresh pork back fat, finely pounded, is the closest working substitute; the recipe's own suggestion of butter gives a shorter, less silky result but is perfectly serviceable.
- Quantities are absentNo weights are given at all beyond "equal parts of veal and cooked liver" and "half the quantity" of udder. Working from 8 oz veal, 8 oz liver and 8 oz fat with three eggs gives a manageable batch of about 1½ lb, enough to line a terrine mould or stuff a large fowl.
- "Cooked liver"Calf's or chicken liver, briefly sealed rather than cooked hard — ten minutes in the pan with the veal will take it well past pink. Overcooked liver turns grainy and bitter, and no amount of pounding recovers the texture.
- Savoury herbs, powderedVictorian recipes for savoury herb powder use dried thyme, marjoram, savory, basil and bay ground together. A tablespoon of dried mixed herbs, or a teaspoon each of thyme and marjoram with a pinch of ground bay, matches the intention.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in a minute; work in short bursts and keep everything cold so the fat does not break. Passing the mixture through a drum sieve or fine mesh afterwards is what gives the classic smooth finish, and is worth the trouble if the forcemeat is going into a terrine.
- It is a component, not a dishThe mixture is raw-egg bound and intended to be cooked in whatever it fills. Bake or poach it through to 160F before serving.
- The price note"1s. per pound" for veal dates the entry rather than helping with it.
Gratin comes from the French gratter, to scrape — originally the browned crust scraped from the bottom of the pan, which is often said to be why the word ended up attached both to a crusted baked dish and, confusingly, to this smooth liver forcemeat, whose flavour depends on the fond built up while the meat fries. Cassell's entry sits on the fault line between the two meanings and hedges by defining both. Farce à gratin was standard equipment in a well-run nineteenth-century kitchen: it lined raised pies and terrines, bound galantines, and was spread on fried bread to catch the juices under roast woodcock and snipe. The calf's udder is the detail that marks the age of the recipe most clearly — a cheap, mild, meltingly soft fat associated with the cookery of Carême's era and his English followers, and which effectively disappeared from British and American butchery in the twentieth century.