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Forcemeat Balls
2/3 cup lean veal or chicken 1/2 cup stale bread crumbs 1/2 cup milk 2 tablespoons butter 1 egg white 1/4 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper Few grains nutmeg Cook bread and milk to a paste, add melted butter and egg white stiffly beaten, and seasonings. Pound meat and add to the mixture. Then force all through a coarse strainer. Form into almond-shaped balls between two spoons. Cook ten minutes in stock that must only simmer.
A garnish rather than a dish: small quenelle-style dumplings poached in the soup pot. The whole point is a smooth, light paste, so the sieving step matters more than it looks.
- The hinge: the stock must not boilA rolling boil tears these apart and toughens the meat. Hold the stock at 180-185F, where it barely shivers, and poach the balls in a single uncrowded layer.
- Use a food processor for the pounding"Pound meat" means a mortar and pestle. Grind the raw veal or chicken cold in a processor, then add the panade and butter and run it smooth; the coarse strainer step can be skipped if the purée is genuinely fine.
- Quantities and weightsTwo-thirds of a cup of chopped raw meat is roughly 5 oz. The recipe yields about 20 to 24 small balls, enough to garnish six to eight bowls of clear soup.
- Cook bread and milk to a pasteThis is a panade. Simmer the crumbs and milk together, stirring, until it pulls from the pan in a mass, then cool it before adding the meat, or the heat will start to set the egg white.
- Stale bread crumbsMeans dry crumbs from day-old bread, not the fine sandy commercial kind and not seasoned crumbs. Tear the crumb from a plain white loaf and let it dry out.
- Egg white stiffly beatenFold the beaten white in gently. The recipe adds it before the meat and then forces everything through a strainer, so much of the lift from beating is lost; the white also works as a binder.
- Shaping between two spoonsDip two teaspoons in hot stock, pass the paste back and forth to form a pointed oval, and slide it straight into the pot. Poach one test ball first: if it disintegrates, work another tablespoon of crumbs into the mixture.
- DonenessTen minutes is right for balls this size; they float and feel firm when set. Larger ones need longer; ground veal should reach 160F at the centre, chicken 165F.
Forcemeat is an old word in the English kitchen vocabulary, from the French farce — stuffing — and by the eighteenth century it covered any pounded, seasoned meat paste used to fill or garnish. Balls of it were standard in mock turtle soup, where they stood in for the gelatinous bits of real turtle, and they persisted in American cookbooks as a way to dress a clear soup for company. The lighter version here, bound with a milk-and-bread panade and lifted with beaten egg white, is close to the French quenelle as taught in the cooking-school tradition of Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries. Its presence in a flour cook book is a reminder that these promotional volumes aimed to be complete household manuals, not just collections of things made with flour.