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Boiled Calf's Udder for French Force- meat
Put the udder into a stewpan with sufficient water to cover it; let it stew gently till quite done, when take it out to cool. Trim all the upper parts, cut it into small pieces, and pound well in a mortar, till it can be rubbed through a sieve. That portion which passes through the strainer is one of the three ingredients of which French forcemeats are generally composed; but many cooks substitute butter for this, being a less troublesome and more expeditious mode of preparation. Forcemeat (for Cold Savoury Pies). -INGREDIENTS for 1 large pie.-1 lb. of veal, 1 lb. of fat bacon; salt, cayenne, pepper and pounded mace to taste; a very little nutmeg, the same of chopped lemonpeel, 1/2 teaspoonful of chopped parsley, teaspoonful of minced savoury herbs, 1 or 2 eggs. AVERAGE COST, 9d.
Chop the veal and bacon together, and put them into a mortar with the other ingredients mentioned above. Pound well, FORCEMEAT. and bind with 1 or 2 eggs which have been previously beaten and strained, Work the whole well together, and the forcemeat will be ready for use. If the pie is not to be eaten immediately, omit the herbs and parsley, as these will prevent it from keeping. Mushrooms or truffies may be added.
Forcemeat (for Pike, Carp, Haddock, and various kinds of Fish).-INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 1 good-sized fish.-1 oz. of fresh butter, 1 oz. of suet, 1 oz. of fat bacon, 1 small teaspoonful of minced savoury herbs, including parsley; a little onion, when liked, shredded very fine; salt, nutmeg and cayenne to taste; 4 oz. of breadcrumbs, 1 egg. AVERAGE COST, 4d. Mix all the ingredients well together, carefully mincing them very finely; beat up the egg, moisten with it, and work the whole very smoothly together. Oysters or anchovies may be added to this forcemeat, and will be found a great improvement.
Three separate preparations run together on one page: the boiled udder panade that stiffens classical French forcemeat, a veal-and-bacon forcemeat for raised pies, and a breadcrumb forcemeat for stuffing whole fish. The first is now essentially a historical curiosity; the other two are workable.
- Calf's udderSold as tétine de veau in parts of France and occasionally through specialist butchers, but effectively unavailable in most English-speaking markets. Beeton herself gives the answer in the text: cooks substitute butter, and modern godiveau and quenelle recipes use butter, cream or a panade instead.
- The mortarAll three preparations assume long pounding to a paste. A food processor does the veal-and-bacon forcemeat in under a minute; keep the meat and fat very cold and pulse rather than run it, or the fat smears and the mixture turns greasy rather than bound.
- Fat baconMeans unsmoked green bacon or fresh pork back fat, not streaky rashers cured with sugar and smoke. Substituting modern smoked bacon shifts the flavour hard and adds salt; reduce added salt if you do.
- Pounded maceGround mace, the lacy aril around the nutmeg. Since nutmeg also appears in the list, use both sparingly — a large pinch of each for a pound of veal and a pound of bacon is ample.
- SuetBeef suet from the butcher, or packaged shredded suet. In the fish forcemeat it is there for richness and moisture in a stuffing that sits in a dry oven; butter alone leaks out faster.
- BreadcrumbsDry white crumbs from stale bread, not the sandy commercial variety and not panko. Four ounces is somewhere between one and two cups depending on how dry and fine the crumbs are, and the mixture should hold together when squeezed without being wet.
- The keeping noteHer instruction to omit parsley and fresh herbs from a pie forcemeat that will be stored is sound: green herbs carry moisture and spoilage organisms and go slimy first. The point is moot if the pie goes straight into the refrigerator and is eaten within a couple of days.
- CookingNeither forcemeat is meant to be eaten as mixed. The pie forcemeat is baked inside the crust and the fish forcemeat inside the fish; bring both to at least 71C/160F. Fry a teaspoonful to check seasoning before committing.
- YieldThe pie forcemeat makes about 2 lb, enough for one large raised pie. The fish forcemeat comes to roughly 9 oz, which Beeton reckons sufficient for one good-sized fish.
Forcemeat — from the French farce, a stuffing, reshaped in English by association with "forcing" a mixture into something — was one of the load-bearing techniques of the nineteenth-century kitchen, used to stuff birds and fish, to bind raised pies and to form quenelles and garnishes. Boiled calf's udder is often associated with the older French tradition of godiveau, where the pounded udder was said to give a forcemeat a pale, tender, faintly gelatinous body that plain butter does not quite reproduce; its appearance in an English domestic manual shows how far French practice had been absorbed into ambitious middle-class cooking. Beeton's aside that many cooks simply use butter instead is the whole book in miniature: the grand method recorded, and the shortcut recorded beside it. Udder had largely disappeared from British butchers by the mid-twentieth century, alongside most of the other offal that once made a small carcass go a long way.}