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Forcemeat Balls
One pound of fresh suet, one ounce ready dressed veal, or chicken chopped fine, bread crumbs, a little shallot or onion, salt and pepper (white), nutmeg; parsley and thyme, finely shred.
Beat as many eggs, yolks and whites separately, as will make the above ingredients into a moist paste; roll into small balls, and fry in boiling lard. When of a light brown, take out with a perforated skimmer. Forcemeat balls made in this way are remarkably light, but being somewhat greasy, some persons prefer them with less suet and eggs.-Mrs. A. M. D.
A garnish rather than a dish: small fried dumplings meant to be dropped into soup, mock turtle, or served around a roast. The proportions as printed are extreme, and the quantities of two key ingredients are left to the cook.
- The suet-to-meat ratioOne pound of suet to one ounce of meat is a startling proportion, and may be a misprint or a very loose transcription of a household habit; the author's own closing sentence admits the result is greasy. Other period forcemeat recipes generally use far more meat in proportion to suet, and a modern cook may prefer to start with 4 oz suet to 8 oz meat.
- "Ready dressed" veal or chickenThis means already cooked — leftover roast or boiled meat, chopped fine. Nothing in the method cooks raw meat through in the time it takes the outside to brown, so cooked meat is not optional.
- Fresh suetBeef kidney suet from a butcher, not the boxed shredded suet sold for puddings (which is coated in flour) and not vegetable suet. Chill it hard and chop or grate it; warm suet smears rather than distributes.
- Unmeasured breadcrumbsThe recipe gives no quantity for the crumbs; it is the eggs that the author explicitly leaves to the cook, beaten "as will make the above ingredients into a moist paste." Add dry crumbs until the mixture holds a ball that keeps its shape when rolled.
- Beating the eggs separatelyBeating yolks and whites apart is likely what lies behind the claim that these are "remarkably light," though the recipe does not say so. It gives no folding instruction either; stop as soon as the paste is moist and cohesive.
- "Boiling lard"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously around the food, which in modern terms falls somewhere in the usual deep-frying range of roughly 350-375F, though the recipe gives no temperature. Cooler than that and the suet leaches out into the pan before the outside sets.
- Shallot and seasoningChop the shallot very fine or it will stay raw and sharp in the brief frying time. White pepper is the usual choice where dark flecks would show in a pale dish, as with cream sauces, though the recipe gives no reason for specifying it.
- Size and yieldSize -- Marble to walnut size, no larger, so the centres heat through before the outsides colour.
Forcemeat — from the French farce, stuffing, by way of the older English "farced meat" — was one of the workhorses of nineteenth-century cookery: a bound paste of chopped meat, fat, crumbs and herbs that could be used as stuffing, as a lining for a pie, or, rolled small and fried as here, as a garnish. Balls of this kind were nearly obligatory in mock turtle soup, where they are often said to have stood in for the fatty green turtle meat the dish was imitating, and they recur throughout the Anglo-American cookbooks of the period. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, which is why the recipe carries initials rather than an author, and why its measurements read like a note passed between cooks who already knew the dish — including the frank aside that some persons prefer them with less suet and eggs.