Home › The Principles of Cookery › Udder, Calf's, for Forcemeat
Udder, Calf's, for Forcemeat
Put the udder into a saucepan with as much broth or water as will cover it. Let it boil gently till it is thoroughly done. When cold trim away the upper parts, and pound the rest in a mortar till it can be passed through a sieve. The pulp will then be ready for putting into forcemeat. Butter may always be substituted for udder in making forcemeat.
This is a component preparation rather than a finished dish: a fat-rich pulp used to enrich forcemeats in the way butter or pork fat would. The last line of the original is the practical one for most cooks.
- Take the escape clauseCassell's own concession — "Butter may always be substituted for udder" — is the sensible route now. Softened unsalted butter, or an equal weight of finely ground fatback, gives the same richness and binding in a quenelle or veal forcemeat.
- What the ingredient isCalf's udder is the mammary tissue of a young bovine, valued because it is largely soft fat held in a fine web of connective tissue and so poaches down to a smooth, mild pulp. It is unlikely to be on display at a general butcher's; you would need to order it ahead from a butcher who handles offal.
- Boiling time"Till it is thoroughly done" means genuinely tender when pierced, which for a whole udder is likely to be a matter of hours rather than minutes; test rather than time it. The original specifies a gentle boil, and a hard one will toughen the connective tissue and cloud the broth, which is worth saving.
- Cooling mattersThe instruction to cool before trimming is not fussiness: warm udder fat smears, and the skin and coarse outer membrane come away more cleanly once the whole thing is properly cold.
- Mortar to processorA food processor does the pounding in under a minute, but the sieving still earns its place — it catches the ducts and gristle that no blade breaks down. Push the pulp through a drum sieve or a fine mesh with a stiff plastic scraper.
- ProportionsThe original gives no ratio because it assumes you know the forcemeat you are making. Where a receipt calls for udder, treat butter as a one-for-one substitution by weight.
- KeepingThe pulp is essentially cooked fat and behaves like one. Covered in the refrigerator it holds three or four days; it freezes well in small portions, which is the only real argument for preparing a whole udder at once.
Forcemeat — from the French farce, stuffing, the English form generally explained as an alteration of it — was the backbone of nineteenth-century cookery, appearing in quenelles, galantines, raised pies, stuffed poultry and garnishes for made dishes, and its quality depended entirely on how much soft fat could be worked into lean meat without the mixture breaking. Calf's udder was prized for that job in French kitchens and in the Anglo-French tradition Cassell's drew on: it is bland, almost white, and pounds to a paste finer than pork fat will. Its presence here, set down without explanation, marks it as familiar at a time when a butcher's shop sold the whole animal and nothing soft and edible was discarded. The offhand permission to use butter instead is the more telling detail — a sign that even then the ingredient was slipping out of reach of the domestic reader the dictionary was written for.