Beat
Chop finely breast and meat from second joints of an uncooked chicken, or one pound of uncooked lean veal. Add one-half cup cracker crumbs, hot stock to moisten, salt, pepper, celery salt, cayenne, lemon juice, and one egg slightly beaten. In stuffing boned chicken, stuff body, legs, and wings, being careful that too much stuffing is not used, as an allowance must be made for the swelling of cracker crumbs.
A forcemeat stuffing for boned poultry, given in the terse style of the period: no quantities for the seasonings and no cooking directions, because the stuffing is cooked inside the bird. A few translations make it workable.
- "Second joints"The thigh, in the butchering vocabulary of the era — drumstick is the first joint. So you are using breast and thigh meat, the two most tender parts, and leaving wings and drumsticks for the carcass or stock.
- Cracker crumbsNot graham or sweet crackers. Use plain unsalted soda crackers or saltines crushed fine; if you use salted ones, hold back on the added salt. Half a cup of crumbs is roughly 1.5 to 2 oz.
- The hinge: don't overpackThe warning at the end is the whole point of the recipe. Cracker crumbs swell as they absorb stock and juices, and a tightly packed boned bird can split its skin along the seam. Fill the cavities loosely, to about three-quarters.
- "Hot stock to moisten"Two to four tablespoons is usually enough. The mixture should hold together when pressed but not be wet or slack — a soupy forcemeat will not slice.
- Seasoning quantitiesThe original leaves them entirely to the cook. For 1 lb of meat, start with 1 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp pepper, 1/2 tsp celery salt, a pinch of cayenne and 1 tsp lemon juice. Fry a teaspoonful of the mixture and taste it before you commit the rest to the bird.
- ChoppingHand-chopping with a heavy knife gives the coarse, sliceable texture intended here. A food processor works if you pulse rather than run it — pureed poultry turns pasty and rubbery once set.
- DonenessThere is raw chicken or veal and raw egg in the mixture, so the stuffing itself needs to reach 165F. Check the centre of the forcemeat with a thermometer, not just the thickest part of the bird.
- YieldAbout 1.25 lb of forcemeat, enough to fill one boned 4-5 lb chicken.
This is forcemeat — from the French farce, often said to have come by way of the older English "forced meat," meaning meat stuffed or crammed into something, though that route is more folk association than established derivation. A boned, stuffed, cooked bird was a set piece of the late nineteenth-century table: the carcass removed whole, the skin refilled with a paler forcemeat, then roasted or poached, pressed, chilled and sliced so each round showed a mosaic of light stuffing inside dark skin. Cracker crumbs as a binder are the American signature; the French tradition would use panade of bread and milk, and the classic galantine adds truffle and pistachio. That the book offers veal as the alternative to chicken breast is a period marker too — veal was mild and valued precisely because it stayed white and took whatever seasoning the cook gave it.