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Tomato Forcemeat
Pour a little boiling fish stock over half a pint of bread-crumbs, pour off any superfluous moisture, and add a beaten egg and a table-spoonful of brown sauce. Fry a small onion and a large tomato, both sliced, in two ounces of butter or clarified fat; add them to the rest, with seasoning to taste. Then put in five or six ounces of raw white fish, cut up small and rubbed through a wire sieve. Blend well. This is very suitable for a baked fish with which tomato sauce would be served. It may also be made into balls for fish stews, or the balls may be egged and bread-crumbed and fried, and used for garnishing fish dishes. Probable cost, about 8d. or 9d.
A Victorian fish stuffing built on a raw-fish panada: the pounded white fish is the binder, so texture depends on it being cold and finely worked. A food processor does in twenty seconds what the wire sieve was for.
- Half a pint of bread-crumbsAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, so roughly 1¼ US cups of soft white crumbs, about 2 to 2½ oz by weight. Use crumbs from a day-old loaf with the crusts off, not dry packaged crumb, which will not swell.
- Brown sauceThis means espagnole or a reduced meat gravy, not the bottled fruit-and-vinegar condiment sold under that name today. A tablespoon of thick demi-glace or reduced dark stock gives the intended savoury depth; bottled brown sauce will read as sweet and vinegary.
- The wire sieveRubbing raw fish through a sieve was one standard way of getting a smooth paste before machines, usually finishing work that began in a mortar. Pulse 5 to 6 oz of skinned, boned white fish (haddock, whiting, cod, pollock) in a processor until it forms a tacky paste, keeping fish and bowl cold so the mixture binds rather than splits.
- Dry out the vegetablesThe hinge of the recipe. Cook the sliced onion and tomato in the 2 oz butter until the tomato has collapsed and the pan is nearly dry, then cool before adding. Wet tomato is what turns this forcemeat sloppy and makes fried balls burst.
- Clarified fatWhere the original offers butter or clarified fat, 'clarified fat' in period kitchens usually meant clarified dripping. Clarified butter or ghee is a convenient modern stand-in and will not scorch during the longer tomato cooking.
- Cooking it throughThe fish and egg are raw, so this is a stuffing to be cooked, not tasted along the way. Whether baked inside a fish, poached as balls in a stew, or crumbed and fried, take the centre to 160F, the figure for a mixture bound with raw egg. Fry balls at 350 to 360F, four to five minutes for walnut-sized ones.
- YieldAbout 1 lb of forcemeat: enough to stuff a 3 to 4 lb whole fish, or to make roughly 20 small garnishing balls.
- The cost note"8d. or 9d." is eight or nine pence in pre-decimal currency, a figure Cassell's printed so a household could cost a menu. It has no modern equivalent worth quoting.
Forcemeat, from the French farce by way of the older English "farced meat," was a workhorse of nineteenth-century kitchens: a bound paste used to stuff, to shape into quenelles and balls, and to garnish. The entry ends by listing three uses for the same bowl of mixture, which is exactly the sort of thrift the book was written to teach. The tomato marks it as relatively late; tomatoes moved from suspicion to staple in British cooking over the second half of the century, and tomato sauce with baked fish became common enough that a matching stuffing made obvious sense. The raw white fish acting as its own binder is the older skill here, descended from the pounded fish panadas that produced quenelles, and it is the reason the mixture holds together without suet or a heavy roux.