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Salt and Spice (F Breadcrumbe Parsley A few)
F2 Breadcrumbe. Parsley. A few Mushrooms.
Onion. Slice the veal, free from skin and sinews, shred the suet, and cut the bacon in strips; pound all well in a mortar, pass this through a sieve, put it back in the mortar, season with salt and aromatic spice, add chopped parsley, mushrooms and onion (a teaspoonful of each), and a small handful of fresh breadcrumbs; work all well for a few minutes longer, and bind with the eggs well beaten. This, like all other forcemeats, should be first tried in boiling water, and if firm, light, and well flavoured, it is ready for use.
This is a classic pounded veal forcemeat — the all-purpose stuffing and quenelle mixture of the late Victorian professional kitchen. The one instruction that decides success is the last one: poach a spoonful before you commit it to anything.
- Test before you use itDrop a teaspoon of the mixture into barely simmering (not violently boiling) water and poach two to three minutes. If it breaks up it needs more egg; if it is rubbery and dense it has too much; if it tastes flat it needs salt. Adjust and test again.
- Keep everything coldVeal, suet and bacon should go into the mortar or processor straight from the refrigerator, and the bowl is better chilled too. Warm fat smears rather than emulsifying and the forcemeat weeps when cooked.
- Mortar, processor, sieveA food processor does the pounding in short bursts. The sieving step is not optional in the original and it is what gives the smooth quenelle texture — push the paste through a fine drum sieve or a stiff conical strainer with a plastic scraper.
- Aromatic spiceProbably a ready-mixed spiced pepper of the kind sometimes called epice fine; the formulas vary from book to book, but mace, nutmeg, cloves and white pepper are the usual constituents, sometimes with bay or dried thyme. A pinch of grated nutmeg plus a little ground mace and white pepper stands in perfectly well.
- ProportionsNo weights are given for the veal, suet, bacon or eggs. A workable starting point is equal weights of lean veal and suet, about a quarter that weight of fat bacon, and one egg per half pound of veal -- then let the poached test decide.
- The suetBeef kidney suet, shredded and free of membrane, is what is meant; ask a butcher or use packaged shredded suet. Do not substitute the vegetable-fat suet sold for puddings, which will not emulsify with the meat.
- Cooking temperaturesAs quenelles, poach at 170-180F and never let the water boil. As a stuffing, cook until the centre of the forcemeat reaches 165F.
- Yield and useMade up from a pound of veal, this gives enough forcemeat to stuff a good-sized fish or bird, or to make roughly two dozen small quenelles for garnish. It does not keep; use it the day it is made.
Forcemeat — from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of the older English "forced meat" — was one of the fixed points of a professional kitchen's daily preparation, drawn on for stuffings, quenelles, garnishes and the linings of raised pies. Veal was often the base of choice because it is pale, mild and gelatinous, so the mixture sets firm without tasting of itself and takes whatever flavour the dish requires; the suet supplies richness and the fat bacon both fat and seasoning. The instruction to poach a trial spoonful is among the long-established quality checks in the repertoire and survives in modern charcuterie and quenelle work. The double pounding, with sieving in between, belonged to an age of cheap kitchen labour, and it is precisely the step most often skipped today.