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Oyster Force-meat
To Fish Force-meat add one-fourth small onion, finely chopped, and fried five minutes in one-half tablespoon butter; then add one-third cup soft part of oysters, parboiled and finely chopped, one-third cup mushrooms finely chopped, and one-third cup Thick White Sauce. Season with salt, cayenne, and one teaspoon finely chopped parsley.
This is a compound recipe: it assumes you have already made Fish Force-meat and Thick White Sauce from elsewhere in the book, and it is a component rather than a dish, meant to stuff a fish, fill quenelles or timbales, or bind a fish roll.
- The two base recipesFish Force-meat and Thick White Sauce are both given elsewhere in the book, and the quantities here mean nothing without them. Look up the book's own versions rather than a remembered formula.
- "Soft part" of the oysterThe body of the oyster as distinct from the tough adductor muscle. Trim that off and save it for stock rather than chopping it into the farce.
- ParboilingDrop the shucked oysters into their own liquor or lightly salted water just until the edges ruffle, about one minute, then lift them out. Anything longer and they tighten into rubber before they ever reach the forcemeat.
- The mushrooms need drying outA third of a cup of chopped raw mushrooms will release a surprising amount of water into a mixture that depends on being stiff. Cook them down in the onion pan until the pan is dry, then cool before combining.
- Everything cold before it meets the fishThe onion, mushrooms, oysters and white sauce all go in cool. Warm additions soften the emulsion of the fish farce and it will weep fat when cooked.
- CayenneThe recipe leaves the amount to the cook: enough to sharpen the oyster, not enough to read as heat. Season the mixture, then poach a teaspoon of it in simmering water and taste it before committing the batch.
- Cooking and yieldThe additions come to about a cup on top of whatever quantity of Fish Force-meat is used; the recipe states no yield. However it is used, cook the forcemeat through, to 145F at the center, since the fish base goes in raw.
Forcemeat is the English rendering of the French farce, a stuffing pounded to a paste, and the word has nothing to do with force; the cookbooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries carried whole batteries of them, keyed to veal, chicken, fish or oyster. That oysters should be the flavoring here says a good deal about Boston in the 1890s, when they were, by most accounts, still cheap and locally abundant, and a household recipe could apparently spend a third of a cup of chopped oyster on a stuffing without remark. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is generally credited with the standardized level measurement, and this entry is barely three sentences long because it can point at two other recipes and trust the numbers to carry across.