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Liver Forcemeat
3 cups goose liver 1 cup bread crumbs 2 cups chicken stock 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Blade of mace 1 cup butter 3 eggs Let the liver stand in hot water fifteen minutes, drain, and cook slowly in salted water for twenty-five minutes, pound and rub through a sieve; cook the bread in the chicken stock, add seasonings, combine with liver, butter and eggs well beaten, mix well together. Chicken, turkey, or veal liver can be substituted.
A forcemeat is a component, not a finished dish, and this entry stops before telling you what to do with it. Everything below assumes you intend to cook it further.
- It is not finished as writtenThe mixture contains three beaten eggs and has not been cooked since they went in. Pack it into a buttered mold or terrine, set that in a water bath, and bake at 325F until the centre reaches 160F, roughly 45-60 minutes for a quart mold. It can also be used as stuffing for poultry or rolled into quenelles and poached in stock until firm.
- Blade of maceA blade is a strip of the dried outer casing (aril) of nutmeg, not ground mace. Use a piece about an inch long, simmer it in the stock with the bread, and fish it out before combining. If blades are unavailable, something in the range of 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon ground mace stands in, depending on how strong you want it.
- The hot-water soakFifteen minutes in hot water loosens the membrane and draws blood from the liver. Peel away any tough connective tissue and green-stained patches after draining; those are bile and will make the whole batch bitter.
- SievingA food processor does in thirty seconds what pounding and sieving does in ten minutes, but push the puree through a fine sieve afterward anyway. Liver holds fibrous threads that a blade only chops smaller.
- A cup of butterThat is 8 oz to 3 cups of liver, a ratio closer to a French pâté than to a stuffing. It is not an error, but it will render out if the mixture is baked too hot, which is another reason for the water bath. Half the butter still gives a workable forcemeat if you want it leaner.
- Goose liverThis means the liver of an ordinary goose, on the order of 3-4 oz each, so three cups is several birds' worth. Chicken livers are the practical substitute the recipe itself offers; something like 2 lb of them will give roughly 3 cups once cooked and puréed.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs from a day-old loaf, not dry packaged crumbs, which will absorb the two cups of stock into paste. If using dry crumbs, cut them to about 2/3 cup.
- YieldAbout six cups, enough to stuff a large bird or to fill two small terrines. It freezes well once baked.
Forcemeat comes, by way of force, from the French farce and ultimately Latin farcire, to stuff; the theatrical sense of farce is usually traced to the same root, a comic piece inserted between the serious parts of a programme. Liver forcemeats of this kind sit at the modest end of a tradition whose luxurious end is pâté de foie gras, the difference being largely one of ratio. The casual note that chicken, turkey, or veal liver may be substituted suggests a cook working with whatever liver was to hand rather than with goose as a matter of course.