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Chicken Forcemeat
1 cup cooked chicken salt, pepper lemon juice, onion juice ½ cup soft bread crumbs cup hot milk 2 eggs 1 teaspoon chopped parsley Chop meat and press through a sieve. Soak bread in milk; add it with remaining ingredients to chicken; season highly and use as a filling in fontage cups, or shape in balls and poach in hot water, or shape in balls, roll in flour, and sauté.
A classic panada-bound forcemeat: cooked chicken, a bread-and-milk paste, and egg, seasoned hard and used three different ways. Most of the work is in the texture.
- The hinge: poach gently, never boil"Hot water" here means water held below a simmer, at a bare shiver with no bubbles breaking the surface (roughly 170-180F if you want a number). A rolling boil tears egg-bound quenelles apart and makes the survivors spongy. Small balls will need something like 8-10 minutes.
- The milk measure is ambiguousThe line reads "cup hot milk" with no quantity, most likely a dropped fraction. Half a cup of milk to half a cup of soft crumbs gives a workable panada; start with less and add only enough to make a thick paste, since a wet mixture will not hold its shape.
- Sieve or processorPressing cooked chicken through a sieve was one of the standard ways to get a fine, even paste, along with pounding it in a mortar. A food processor does it in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, and stop while the meat still has a little grain to it or the forcemeat turns pasty.
- Test one ball firstPoach a single small ball before shaping the rest. If it falls apart, work in another spoonful of crumbs; if it is rubbery and tight, the mixture has too much egg or was overworked. This is also the only reliable way to check the seasoning, since raw forcemeat cannot be tasted.
- "Season highly"Taken literally. Cooked chicken is bland, and the bread and milk dilute it further. The lemon juice and onion juice are as much seasoning as the salt and pepper -- onion juice means juice pressed or grated from a raw onion, and the recipe leaves the amount to the cook.
- Fontage cupsSmall batter cups baked in fontage or timbale tins, a period way of presenting a soft filling upright at table. Any small pastry case, baked tartlet shell, or even a hollowed-out roll serves the same purpose.
- SautéingRoll the floured balls in a shallow pan over medium heat and turn them so they colour on all sides; the mixture is already cooked meat, so you are setting the egg and browning the outside, about 5-6 minutes total.
- YieldOne cup of chicken makes roughly 16 walnut-sized balls -- a garnish or light course for four, or the filling for about six small cups.
Forcemeat comes from the French farce, a stuffing, and by way of that word from the Latin for "to stuff"; the English spelling is often said to have been reshaped by folk etymology into something that sounds like meat forced through a sieve, which is in fact what the cook does here. Bread soaked in milk -- a panade or panada -- was the standard binder in nineteenth-century kitchens, lightening the meat and stretching it, and the same technique underlies quenelles, meatballs and the finer sausages. It was not a dish in its own right but a component, poached to garnish a soup, sautéed as a border for a platter, or spooned into small baked cups. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate makers, and like other manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks of the period it surrounds its promotional chocolate recipes with a complete, conventional course in American domestic cooking of the era -- including thrifty ways of using up yesterday's cooked fowl.