Forcemeat
2 cups raw lean veal 1 cup stale bread crumbs 2 cups cream A blade of mace 6 tablespoons butter 2 teaspoons salt 1/8 teaspoon white pepper 4 egg whites Scrape the veal to a pulp and pound smooth; cook bread crumbs in cream with blade of mace for twenty minutes, remove the mace and with a spoon mash to a firm paste; add the butter, seasonings and pounded meat. Beat all together and, lastly, fold in the egg whites beaten stiff. Set away to cool.
This is a quenelle forcemeat — a panada-bound veal mousseline meant as a component, not a finished dish. It is uncooked when you set it away, and it must be poached, baked or used as a stuffing before it reaches the table.
- Keep everything coldThe hinge of any mousseline is temperature. Chill the veal, the cream and the bowl; if the butter and cream warm while you beat, the emulsion can break and the finished quenelles turn grainy and weep fat.
- Scraping and poundingThe original says only to scrape the veal to a pulp and pound it smooth, which implies a mortar. A food processor does much the same work: grind the trimmed veal cold in short pulses, then add the cooled panada and butter, and push the mixture through a fine sieve if you want a smoother texture.
- A blade of maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold in flat orange blades. Equivalences vary, but a blade is somewhere in the region of a quarter to a half teaspoon of ground mace; since ground mace cannot be fished back out, use whole blade if you can find it and infuse it as directed.
- Stale bread crumbsMeans dried-out crumb from a plain white loaf, not the fine dry crumbs in a canister. Two cups of cream to one cup of such crumbs cooks down to a stiff paste called a panada; if your crumbs are commercial and very fine, start with less cream and add more as it thickens.
- Twenty minutes over low heatCook the panada in a heavy pan over the lowest flame, stirring, or it will scorch at the bottom before it thickens. It should pull away from the sides in one mass.
- The egg whitesFour whites folded into a warm mixture will deflate. Cool the veal-and-panada base to room temperature or below first, then fold, then chill.
- Cooking itShape with two wet spoons and poach in barely trembling salted stock or water at 170-180F for 8-12 minutes depending on size. A rolling boil shreds them. Poach one test quenelle first and correct the salt in the raw mixture, which will taste flat cold.
- YieldRoughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb of forcemeat, depending on how far the panada reduces; enough for a large batch of spoon-shaped quenelles or garnish for a soup for eight to ten. Use it within a day, and cook it before serving since nothing in this recipe brings the veal to a safe temperature.
Forcemeat is the older English rendering of the French farce, from farcir, to stuff — the same root that gives us farce in the theatrical sense, a stuffing between acts. A veal forcemeat lightened with a bread panada, butter and beaten whites is the classic quenelle base of nineteenth-century French service, and its presence in a promotional flour cookbook says something about American cooking: even a milling company's giveaway booklet assumed a home cook working with the vocabulary of the professional kitchen, and assumed she had the arm for scraping and pounding meat by hand. Veal was valued for exactly the qualities this recipe needs — pale color and mild flavor.