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Oyster Forcemeat
1 doz. large oysters 2 cups bread crumbs 3 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon minced parsley A grate of nutmeg 1 tablespoon lemon juice 3 tablespoons oyster juice 2 raw egg yolks Drain and wash the oysters, scald and strain the oyster liquor; chop the oysters very fine; combine the other ingredients, pound to a smooth paste and rub through a sieve.
This is a component, not a finished dish: a bound oyster paste meant to stuff fish, poultry or vol-au-vent cases, or to be poached in small quenelles. The book assumes you know that, so nothing here is cooked.
- It must be cookedThe mixture contains raw oysters and two raw egg yolks and is never brought to heat in these instructions. Use it only inside something that will be baked or poached to at least 165F at the center, and refrigerate it until the moment it goes in.
- Chop, then poundThe order matters. Mincing the oysters first breaks them down enough that pounding binds the crumbs and yolks into a paste rather than tearing shreds of muscle through it. A food processor does the whole job in short pulses, though it will not give the fine texture the sieve was for.
- Sieving is optionalRubbing forcemeat through a sieve gave a smooth paste and would also catch tough frill or any grit left in the oysters. If you are pulsing in a processor and your oysters are clean, skip it; if you want the smooth pale quenelle texture, do it.
- Bread crumbsCrumbs in household books of this period generally meant dry crumbs grated from stale bread, coarser and thirstier than commercial fine crumbs and much thirstier than fresh. Two cups of dry crumbs should absorb the liquid as written; with fresh crumbs, expect a looser paste and hold back some of the oyster liquor.
- Scalding the liquorBring the strained oyster liquor just to a simmer and strain again. Heating coagulates the fine albuminous matter so it can be strained out, and any sand or shell fragments that survived the first straining settle out with it.
- Butter temperatureThree tablespoons of butter should be soft, not melted. Melted butter will not emulsify into the crumbs and yolks and the forcemeat will weep fat during cooking.
- Nutmeg"A grate" is a pinch, less than an eighth of a teaspoon. Pre-ground nutmeg is flatter than freshly grated; use a bare pinch either way.
- YieldRoughly two cups, enough to stuff a small whole fish or a roasting chicken, or to fill a dozen small pastry cases.
Forcemeat comes from the French farce, a stuffing (Latin farcire, to stuff), and the 'force' spelling is an alteration of that word rather than a separate origin, from the same root that gives us farce in the theatrical sense, a filling shoved into a gap. Oysters as a stuffing ingredient look extravagant now, but for American cooks around 1900 they were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans, which is why they turn up in turkey stuffings, sauces and entrees throughout the promotional cookbooks of the era. Gold Medal's book was published by the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis to sell flour, and its entree section leans heavily on this sort of French-derived kitchen vocabulary, the mark of a housekeeper's manual aiming a little above plain cooking. The finishing instruction, to rub the paste through a sieve, echoes professional kitchen practice, where tamis work was routine and the smoothness of a farce was a point of pride.