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Chicken Forcemeat
Chop, pound and rub through a purée sieve the uncooked breasts of two chickens. This should give a full half-pint of meat. Mix with the latter one-half tablespoon of salt, and one-eighth teaspoon of pepper. Boil together one gill of stale bread crumbs (no crusts), one-half pint of cream and one-half blade of mace until cooked to a smooth paste-say ten minutes; remove from the fire, put in three tablespoons of butter and then add the seasoned meat and the well-beaten whites of three eggs. Stir all the ingredients until thoroughly blended. To make dark chicken forcemeat, use dark meat instead of light and the yolks of the eggs in place of the whites. Chicken livers may also be used for forcemeat.
This is a quenelle mixture — poached dumplings meant to be dropped into clear soup — and the original assumes you already know how to cook it. Two things need adding: the poaching method and the temperature the finished dumplings must reach.
- The hinge: everything stays coldRaw chicken and cream emulsify only while chilled. Chill the purée, the cream paste and the bowl before combining, and if the mixture starts to look grainy or weepy, refrigerate it for twenty minutes before going on.
- UnitsA gill is half a cup, so the bread crumbs are 1/2 cup loosely packed. Half a pint of cream is 1 cup, and "a full half-pint of meat" is a generous cup of sieved breast — the breasts of two average modern chickens will overshoot this, so weigh out about 8 oz of trimmed meat.
- Chop, pound and sieveA food processor does the whole job. Pulse the cold cubed breast to a paste, then push it through a fine sieve with a rubber spatula to catch sinew. The sieving is not optional; unstrained forcemeat has stringy threads in it.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed, usually sold ground today, though whole blades can still be found. Half a blade is roughly a pinch — perhaps 1/8 teaspoon ground. If you use whole blade, fish it out before adding the meat.
- The panadeCrumbs, cream and mace cooked ten minutes over low heat makes a thick paste that binds the forcemeat. Stir constantly and use a heavy pan; the cream scorches easily at that reduction. Cool it to room temperature or below before it meets the raw chicken.
- SaltHalf a tablespoon of salt — 1 1/2 teaspoons — to a cup of meat is on the assertive side by modern taste, though forcemeat eaten in unsalted broth needs seasoning. Start with a teaspoon of fine salt and taste a poached test dumpling.
- Cooking, which the original omitsShape with two wet teaspoons and poach in barely trembling stock or salted water at about 170–180F for 8–10 minutes, until firm and cooked to 165F at the centre. A rolling boil will blow the dumplings apart.
- Test one firstPoach a single small quenelle before shaping the rest. If it falls apart, work in another beaten egg white; if it is rubbery, slacken with a spoonful of cream.
- YieldRoughly two to three dozen teaspoon-sized quenelles, depending on how they are shaped, enough to garnish several bowls of consommé. The mixture also poaches well in a buttered mould and can be sliced into rounds or diamonds.
Forcemeat — from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of the older English "farce meat" — was the workhorse of the professional larder, and by the late nineteenth century its most refined form was the quenelle: pounded raw flesh bound with a bread-and-cream panade and lightened with egg. Forcemeats of this kind were commonly served as little pale dumplings in clear broth, alongside period soup garnishes such as royal custard and marrow balls. The instruction to make a dark version with dark meat and yolks, and the pale version with breast and whites, may reflect a taste for contrasting colours of garnish. Pounding breast meat to a paste in a mortar and driving it through a sieve was laborious hand work in a period kitchen; a food processor does it in moments.