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Ham Forcemeat
1 ounce ham 2 ounces suet. 2 ounces fine bread crumbs Grated rind of 1/2 lemon Dash of nutmeg Pinch of mace 1 egg 2 tablespoons milk Salt and pepper 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 1/2 teaspoon mixed herbs Chop the ham and suet fine; mix the dry ingredients; add the egg; season to taste; mix well and use as required.
A loose-leaf page written for cooks who already knew what forcemeat was: this is a bread-and-suet stuffing, sharpened with ham, meant to be packed into a bird or rolled into balls and cooked. Note that the printed ingredient list omits the two things the method names first.
- The missing quantitiesHam and suet appear in the instructions but not in the ingredient list, so their amounts are genuinely unknown here. Other forcemeats of this type are often built on similar weights of breadcrumb, chopped fat and chopped meat, which would put ham and suet at about 2 ounces each; treat that as a guess for reconstruction, not the original.
- 2 ounces of crumbsBy weight, not volume. That is about 1 cup of soft fresh crumbs or a scant 1/2 cup of dry ones. Fresh crumbs give a lighter, moister forcemeat; dry crumbs will want the full 2 tablespoons of milk and possibly a little more.
- SuetBeef kidney suet, sold shredded by butchers and in some supermarkets. If unavailable, cold unsalted butter grated on the coarse side of a box grater is the usual stand-in; it melts sooner and the mixture will be slightly denser.
- Mixed herbsUsually thyme, marjoram and sage, sometimes with parsley and savory; the phrase could mean either a dried blend or fresh herbs chopped together. Any dried poultry-herb mixture works; 1/2 teaspoon of dried is about 1 1/2 teaspoons chopped fresh.
- MaceThe outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than the nut itself. Ground mace is still sold; do not simply double the nutmeg, which will dominate.
- Season with careThe ham is already salted. Taste the seasoning before the egg goes in, or fry a teaspoon of the finished mixture and taste that, rather than salting to the printed instruction blind.
- Cooking itThis is uncooked and contains raw egg. Stuffed inside a bird the centre of the stuffing needs to reach 165F, which usually means the bird runs past that itself; cooking it separately in a dish, or as balls browned and then baked at 375F for 20-25 minutes, gives better control.
- YieldAs reconstructed, roughly 1 1/2 cups, or about a dozen small forcemeat balls. Enough for the neck end of a small turkey, or a partial stuffing for a chicken.
Forcemeat is the English rendering of the French farce, a stuffing, and by the nineteenth century it had become a fixed category in household cookery rather than a single dish: a bound paste of crumbs, fat and flavouring that could be pushed into a bird, poached as quenelles, rolled into balls to garnish a stew, or spread under the skin of a roast. The ham version exists to make thrift look deliberate, turning the dry end of a boiled ham into seasoning; the suet is doing the work margarine and butter do in modern stuffings, and the lemon rind and mace are the older English habit, still current in Victorian and Edwardian kitchens, of treating a savoury mixture with what a modern cook would think of as baking spices.