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VEAL, GODIVEAU (a kind of forcemeat)
Take a quarter of a pound of lean veal free from skin and sinew and an equal weight of good beef suet. Mince these very finely. Add a small bunch of parsley and a few chives, chopped small, together with a seasoning of pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Pound the ingredients in a mortar till they form a smooth, firm paste, and place this on ice for an hour. Put it again into the mortar with three ounces of pure ice, and pound it till it looks soft and creamy. Roll it in flour on the table, divide it into small round balls about the size of marbles, and bake these on a baking-sheet in a moderately-heated oven. Time to bake the balls, five minutes. (See also GODIVEAU.)
A classic French forcemeat, worked cold and lightened with pounded ice rather than egg or cream. Everything depends on keeping the fat from melting.
- Keep it cold, alwaysThe hinge of the recipe is temperature. Suet that is allowed to warm smears instead of emulsifying, and the finished balls turn greasy and dense. Chill the meat, the suet, the bowl and the blade, and stop working the mixture the moment it looks creamy.
- Mortar or processorA food processor does in a few short bursts what the mortar does at length. Pulse the meat and suet to a paste, chill an hour as directed, then pulse again with the ice. Long continuous running heats the mixture and defeats the purpose.
- The ice is an ingredientThree ounces of ice to half a pound of meat and fat is roughly a third of the weight of the base. It melts into the paste as it is pounded and is what makes godiveau light rather than merely minced meat. Use clean crushed ice, not shaved ice full of freezer smells.
- Beef suetFresh raw beef kidney suet from a butcher, not the shredded packet suet sold for puddings, which is coated in flour or rice flour and will not emulsify. Peel away the membranes before mincing.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; 'moderately-heated' is generally taken as somewhere around 350-375F in modern terms. Five minutes suits balls the size of marbles; anything larger needs proportionately longer, and the interior should reach 160F since this is raw veal.
- Test the seasoningThe paste is tasted by cooking a small piece, not by tasting it raw. Poach a teaspoonful in simmering water for a minute or two and adjust salt, pepper and nutmeg before shaping the rest.
- Poaching as an alternativeGodiveau is more often poached than baked. Dropped into barely simmering salted water or stock, the same paste gives quenelles for garnishing soups and vol-au-vents; keep the liquid below a rolling boil or they break up.
- YieldHalf a pound of paste gives roughly 40 to 50 marble-sized balls, enough to garnish soup for six to eight.
Godiveau is the old French kitchen term for a fine forcemeat of veal and suet, distinguished from the coarser farce by being pounded to a paste and, in the classical version, lightened with ice or iced water. The origin of the word is disputed; it is often linked to the same family of old French butchery terms that gave godebillaux, the tripe and offal of Rabelais's kitchens, though nothing about the derivation is settled. By the nineteenth century godiveau had a settled place in the repertoire as the base for quenelles, for stuffing vol-au-vents and for the small garnishing balls described here, and a variant made with pike became a fixture of Lyonnais cooking. The reliance on pounded ice, rather than cream or panada, marks it as the older method, and it explains why the recipe insists twice on chilling: without a mechanical grinder or refrigeration, a warm larder could ruin a forcemeat in minutes.