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Chicken Forcemeat
3/4 cup raw chicken meat 1/2 cup fine bread crumbs 1/2 cup milk White of 1 egg Salt and red pepper Dash of nutmeg 2 tablespoons butter Chop the chicken very fine and press through a sieve. Cook the bread and milk to a paste; add the butter, eggs and seasonings, and mix with the chicken.
A classic panada-based forcemeat: bread cooked in milk, bound with egg white, enriched with butter and used as stuffing, quenelles or a farce for galantines. It is a component, not a finished dish, and the original never tells you to cook it.
- It must be cookedThis is raw ground chicken. Whether piped as quenelles into simmering stock, stuffed into a bird, or baked in a mould, it needs to reach 165F throughout. Nothing in the printed text says so.
- The panada is the hinge"Cook the bread and milk to a paste" is the standard panada step: stir over low heat until the mixture thickens into a single mass. Standard practice is to cool it before mixing in the meat; a warm or loose panada makes the forcemeat harder to bind.
- Chopping and sievingThe original wants the meat chopped very fine and pressed through a sieve, slow work by hand. A food processor does it quickly, but keep the meat, butter and panada thoroughly chilled or the emulsion breaks.
- "Eggs" is a slipThe ingredient list gives the white of one egg; the method says "eggs." Follow the list. One white to three-quarters cup of meat is the right proportion for a light bind.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not black pepper. A pinch is plenty in a mixture this pale and delicate.
- The last two ingredients"1 ounce ham 2 ounces suet" is tacked on with no instruction and no indication of how it relates to the method above. It may belong to a variation or to an adjacent recipe; there is no way to tell from the text. Treat it as optional rather than guessing at a method.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half of forcemeat by rough estimate from the quantities given, enough to stuff a small bird or make a few small quenelles; the original states no yield.
Forcemeat comes from the French farce, meaning stuffing; the "force" element is generally traced to an older English verb meaning to stuff, itself an alteration of "farce." A white chicken forcemeat of this kind was one of the workhorses of the professional and upper-middle-class kitchen from the eighteenth century onward, appearing as quenelles floated in clear soup, as the binding in a galantine or a raised pie, as balls poached alongside a fricassee, and as stuffing for boned poultry. The bread-and-milk panada that holds it together is the same technique that underlies a French quenelle de volaille and, in a coarser register, a meatball. That Mrs. Fryer's book presents it as a bare formula, with no serving suggestion at all, suggests it may have been assumed knowledge: one imagines that a cook consulting the poultry section in the early twentieth century already knew what to do with a bowl of forcemeat.