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One Anchovy (Chop up the suet liver)
Chop up the suet, liver, and a little shalot; wash and bone the anchovy and chop it also, and the parsley; mix all the ingredients together and bind with the egg.
This is the method half of a forcemeat — a stuffing for game birds — printed with its ingredient list above it in the original book. Read it as a component, not a finished dish: it is meant to go inside a bird or under it on the toast, and it is never eaten as mixed.
- What the mixture is forA forcemeat of this type is not eaten as mixed: it is cooked, whether packed into a bird, spread on fried bread, or shaped and poached. Whatever the destination, the raw liver and egg must reach a properly cooked state.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard kidney fat, shredded or grated fine. Packaged shredded suet works; if using fresh suet from a butcher, chill it hard and grate it, discarding the membrane. Suet is doing the job that butter cannot here, staying solid long enough to baste the mixture from within as it cooks.
- LiverThe kind is unspecified; a bird's own liver from the trail or a few chicken livers both suit. Trim any greenish bile-stained patch, which is bitter, and any tough connective threads.
- ShalotShallot. The recipe says only "a little"; half a small one, chopped very fine, is enough to season without dominating. It goes in raw and softens in the cooking.
- AnchovyThe recipe assumes a whole salted anchovy from the barrel, which is why it must be washed and boned. A modern equivalent is two oil-packed fillets, blotted, or one salt-packed fillet rinsed and filleted. Salt accordingly: the anchovy is the seasoning, and salt-packed fish carry considerably more of it.
- Binding with the eggOne egg, beaten, added last and only until the mixture just coheres. Too much egg makes the forcemeat set firm and rubbery in the heat rather than crumbly. If it looks wet, a spoonful of fine breadcrumbs will bring it back.
- TextureChop everything by hand and keep it coarse. A food processor turns suet and liver into a smooth paste that cooks to a dense pâté rather than the loose, savoury crumb this is after.
History: Forcemeats of suet, liver, shallot, parsley and anchovy bound with egg appear in English cookery books and are among the mixtures served with roast meat and game. The anchovy is the interesting part: English cooks had used it from the seventeenth century onwards as a savoury note that reads not as fish but as depth, the same instinct behind the anchovies in Worcestershire sauce and the anchovy butter served with steak. Serving small game on a crouton spread with a liver-and-suet paste is often linked to the practice of roasting woodcock and snipe undrawn over a slice of bread that catches the trail, though the line of transmission from French to English cookery is not documented as firmly as this suggests.