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Turkey, Stuffed with Mushroom Forcemeat
Take six or eight small mushrooms, peel them, put them into a saucepan with a slice of fresh butter, and let them simmer gently for seven or eight minutes. Drain the liquor from them, and let them cool; then mince them, and mix them with a quarter of a pound of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Add a slight seasoning of salt, cayenne, grated nutmeg, and grated lemon-rind, but be careful that the mushroom flavour is not overpowered. Work an ounce of fresh butter into the forcemeat, bind it together with the yolk of an egg, and add as much of the butter in which the mushrooms were stewed as it will take without being made too moist. Pound the mixture thoroughly, and it will be ready for use. Fill the turkey with it, boil or roast the bird, and send mushroom sauce to table with it. Double this quantity of forcemeat will be required for a large turkey. Time, one hour to prepare the forcemeat.
This is a stuffing recipe with the bird treated almost as an afterthought; the weights are small by modern standards and assume a cook who will scale up.
- Scale firstA quarter pound (4 oz) of finely grated crumbs plus six to eight small mushrooms makes a modest quantity of forcemeat. As the text says, double it for a large turkey.
- Peeling mushroomsPeeling was the standard instruction of the period, when much of the supply was gathered field mushroom with a coarse skin. Cultivated buttons or chestnuts need only wiping; skip the peeling and keep the trimmed stems, chopped, for the pan.
- "A slice of fresh butter"Read this as roughly 1 oz (2 tablespoons). "Fresh" means unsalted, as against the heavily salted keeping butter of the period, so use unsalted and season to taste.
- The moisture hingeAdd the reserved mushroom butter a spoonful at a time. A stuffing that is wet going in will not set inside the bird, and mushroom forcemeat in particular collapses into paste. It should hold a shape when squeezed and no more.
- PoundingThe mortar work is what gives this its close, sliceable texture. A few pulses in a food processor does the same job, but stop before the crumbs turn to putty.
- Stuffing the cavityPack loosely and weigh the bird after filling to calculate roast time. Current practice is to bring the centre of the stuffing to 165F/74C, which is slower than the surrounding meat; if that pushes the breast past done, bake the forcemeat separately in a buttered dish at 350F for 35-40 minutes.
- Roast or boilRoasting: 325-350F, roughly 15-20 minutes per pound for a stuffed bird, until the thigh reads 175F. Boiled turkey was a genuine Victorian dish, gently poached rather than boiled hard, and served under a white or oyster sauce; it is worth knowing about but the forcemeat suits roasting better.
- Timing noteThe stated "one hour to prepare the forcemeat" reflects hand-grating crumbs and lemon rind and pounding in a mortar. With a grater and a processor it is twenty minutes, most of it the mushrooms cooling.
Forcemeat, from the French farce, was a whole department of nineteenth-century cookery: seasoned bread-and-fat mixtures bound with egg, used to stuff birds, line pies, roll into quenelles or shape into balls for garnish. Mushrooms are generally thought to have been a relative luxury flavouring in Britain at this date, since commercial cultivation was still small-scale and much of the supply was gathered field mushroom, which may lie behind the recipe's insistence that nothing be allowed to overpower them and the recommendation of a mushroom sauce alongside to double the effect. The cayenne, nutmeg and lemon rind are a familiar Victorian seasoning trio for a pale forcemeat, though this recipe calls only for a slight seasoning and gives no proportions.