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Turkey, Forcemeat of Chestnuts For
Mince finely a pound of fat, unsmoked bacon and three-quarters of a pound of lean, uncooked veal. Season the mince with salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg, and pound it in a mortar till smooth. Roast and peel three dozen chestnuts, and put them into the body of the bird with the forcemeat. Or roast a pint of chestnuts gently, and peel them; weigh them, and simmer half a pound of them for twenty minutes in as much veal gravy as will cover them. Drain them, and let them cool, then pound them in a mortar with four ounces of fresh butter, three ounces of grated bread-crumbs, a pinch of grated lemon-rind, a smaller one of powdered mace, and a little pepper, salt, and cayenne. Bind the mixture together with the unbeaten yolks of three eggs.
Two forcemeats in one entry: a plain pounded bacon-and-veal mince with whole roast chestnuts, and a richer chestnut panada bound with egg yolk. Both are cavity stuffings for a roast turkey, and both assume a mortar and a cook with time to peel chestnuts.
- "Fat, unsmoked bacon"This is green bacon, i.e. salted but unsmoked, rather than the cured smoked rashers usually sold today. Unsmoked streaky bacon is the closest match; plain pork fat will stand in for the fat content, though it lacks the cure. Smoked bacon will dominate the chestnuts.
- Chestnut quantitiesThree dozen chestnuts is roughly 1 lb in the shell, yielding about 12 oz peeled. A pint of chestnuts is a volume measure of nuts in shell, again close to 1 lb; the recipe then tells you to weigh out half a pound of the peeled kernels, which is the number that matters.
- PeelingScore each nut across the flat side before roasting, and peel while hot; the recipe's second version asks for gentle roasting, so a moderate oven rather than a fierce one. Both skins must come away, since the inner pellicle is bitter and will not pound smooth. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are an honest substitute and skip the whole operation.
- For the mortar, a processorPounding a pound of fat bacon and three-quarters of a pound of veal to a smooth paste is a long job by hand. A food processor does it quickly, but keep the meat cold and pulse rather than run it, or the fat smears and the forcemeat goes greasy.
- Veal and veal gravyUncooked veal is still available but expensive; lean pork shoulder or turkey thigh meat behaves much the same in a forcemeat. For the gravy in the second version, an unsalted light chicken or veal stock is close enough to simmer the chestnuts in.
- The raw yolksThe three unbeaten yolks are a binder and will be cooked through in the bird. They are not a raw-egg dish, but the stuffing has to reach the same temperature as the meat.
- Cooking it in the birdStuff loosely, weigh the bird after stuffing, and take the temperature at the centre of the forcemeat as well as the thigh: both need 165F. A dense meat forcemeat packed tight will hold the breast at overcooked while the middle is still cold. Baking part of it in a separate dish is the reliable route.
- YieldNeither version is given a yield; between them the quantities make a generous amount of stuffing, enough for a large bird with some to spare. The second, richer forcemeat is the more useful of the two if you want a sliceable stuffing; the first is a plain pounded bacon-and-veal mince with whole nuts through it.
Chestnuts and turkey became a fixed pairing in nineteenth-century English cookery, an association often traced to France, where dinde aux marrons was already established, and the standard Victorian treatment is a pounded meat panada with chestnuts either whole or worked to a paste. The two alternatives in one entry reflect how these dictionaries worked, gathering variant practice under a heading rather than prescribing a single method. Chestnuts were then a cheap autumn commodity in Britain and across Europe, sold roasted on streets and used as a starch as much as a luxury, which is why a stuffing could call for three dozen without comment. The mortar work is the real marker of the period: before mechanical mincers were common in domestic kitchens, a smooth forcemeat meant sustained pounding.