Home › Egg Dishes and Omelets › Eggs in Forcemeat
Eggs in Forcemeat
For six persons there will be needed four eggs; one cup of grated bread crumbs; one cup of any kind of finely-chopped cold meat; three gills of soup stock; two tablespoons of butter; one heaping teaspoon of flour; one teaspoon of salt; onethird teaspoon of pepper; one slice of onion; one teaspoon of lemon juice; one clove; one bay leaf; one sprig of parsley and a grating of nutmeg. Hard boil the eggs, shell and cut them in two and rub the yolks through a sieve or strainer. Now rub the flour and butter together, add the stock and seasoning, stew gently twelve minutes and then strain it over the bread crumbs and meat which must be well mixed. Fill the egg hollows with some of this mixture and spread the rest on a small platter. Stand the filled eggs on this bed of forcemeat and decorate them and it with little mounds of the sifted yolks. Bake in a moderate oven eight minutes. Serve with one-half pint of tomato, béchamel or brown sauce poured over the dish or in a separate dish. Nice for luncheon.
A late-Victorian luncheon dish built around hard-boiled eggs stuffed with a moistened meat forcemeat. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions read oddly to a modern eye and the quantities need translating.
- The hinge is the moistureThe strained stock goes over the crumbs and meat and must be absorbed before you fill anything. Aim for a mixture that holds its shape when pressed into the egg hollows and mounds on the platter without weeping; add the liquid gradually rather than all at once, since bread crumbs vary enormously in how much they take up.
- Three gillsA gill is half a cup, so three gills is a cup and a half. The half pint of sauce at the end is one cup.
- That is not a rouxOne heaping teaspoon of flour to a cup and a half of stock thickens almost nothing, and it is not meant to. The butter and flour are there to carry the aromatics and give the liquid a little body before it is strained onto the crumbs.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F, though period sources put "moderate" anywhere from about 350 to 375F. The eggs are already cooked and the filling is already hot, so the eight minutes is only to set and warm the surface. Longer than that and the whites turn tough and squeaky.
- ForcemeatIn this period the word means any seasoned, bound mixture of chopped meat, not the fine emulsified farce of French charcuterie. "Any kind of finely-chopped cold meat" means exactly that: leftover roast beef, ham, chicken, tongue. Chop by hand or pulse briefly; a food processor will turn it to paste.
- Grated bread crumbsDry crumbs grated from stale bread, closer to modern fine dry crumbs than to soft fresh ones. Packaged plain crumbs work; panko does not, as it stays too coarse to bind.
- Strain out the whole spicesThe clove, bay leaf, onion slice and parsley go into the stock and come out with the straining. Leaving the clove in a serving is unpleasant.
- Season above your instinctCold cooked meat and dry crumbs are both bland and both absorb salt. The teaspoon of salt is for the stock, and the mixture will still want tasting and correcting before it goes into the eggs.
- Yield and servingSix persons, eight halves from four eggs, so it is a light luncheon course rather than a dinner. Boiling five eggs gives you an extra sieved yolk for the decorative mounds and a spare half if one tears while shelling.
Stuffed hard-boiled eggs presented on a bed of forcemeat offered a way for a turn-of-the-century household to turn Sunday's cold roast into Tuesday's luncheon dish without it looking like leftovers. The Butterick Publishing Company, a pattern firm that also published cookbooks, would have found an evident readership among middle-class women running a house with limited help, for whom a dish that looked composed and could be assembled from what was already in the larder had obvious appeal. The vocabulary is borrowed from professional French kitchens — forcemeat, béchamel, the aromatics stewed in stock and strained — but the economy is domestic. The choice of tomato, béchamel or brown sauce at the end is characteristic of the period's cookbooks, which assumed a cook kept the basic sauces in her repertoire and could match one to whatever meat had gone into the filling.