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Tomato Forcemeat
1 tomato finely chopped 1 pimento finely chopped 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup raw fish finely chopped 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon chopped onion Melt butter; add onion, cook three minutes; add remaining ingredients, cook ten minutes. Use as filling for fish sandwiches, or spread over fish chops, or poach and serve with White Sauce. 2 quarts consommé
A small skillet forcemeat — a bound fish paste meant to be used three different ways. The proportions are workable, but two lines need decoding before you start.
- The stray last line"2 quarts consommé" belongs to no step here; it appears to be a fragment carried over from an adjacent recipe. Ignore it entirely.
- ForcemeatFrom the French farce: chopped raw meat or fish worked with fat and a binder until it holds together. Here the butter-and-flour roux does the binding, so the mixture thickens as the fish gives up moisture.
- PimentoMeans a whole mild red sweet pepper, usually the canned roasted kind, not ground paprika and not a hot chile. One canned pimento, drained and chopped, is about two tablespoons.
- The fishAny firm white fish — cod, haddock, halibut — skinned, boned and chopped fine with a knife rather than pureed in a processor, which turns it to paste. A cup is roughly 6 oz.
- Watch the waterA fresh tomato and raw fish both release liquid. Ten minutes over medium heat should leave a thick, spreadable mass; if it is still loose, keep cooking rather than adding more flour.
- "Fish chops"A period term for a cutlet-shaped croquette of cooked fish, breaded and fried.
- Poaching itShape into small quenelles and drop into barely simmering salted water or fish stock; hold the water below a boil or they break up. Serve with the book's white sauce.
- Salt and yieldA teaspoon of salt for this volume is on the heavy side by current taste -- start with half. The batch is small, a cup and a half or so of filling.
- DonenessWhatever the finish, the fish should be opaque throughout, 145F at the centre, before it goes into a sandwich.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that, like Baker's and Rumford, found it profitable to give away cookery instruction alongside its product. That commercial origin explains the book's sprawl: a chocolate house had no reason to stop at desserts, so the volume runs through sauces, entrées and made dishes as well. This one belongs to the American middle-class fashion for French kitchen vocabulary — forcemeats, quenelles, chops moulded from scraps — adapted to household means. Canned pimentos turn up constantly in recipes of this vintage as an easy note of colour and sweetness, though the domestic canning industry is generally reckoned not to have got going on any scale until around 1911, with imported Spanish tins available earlier.