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American Forcemeat
Place in a saucepan two very finely-chopped onions with one ounce of butter on the fire for five minutes. Soak the crumb of a loaf of bread in water for fifteen minutes; press out all the water and put the crumb in a bowl with three eggs, one tablespoonful of salt, two teaspoonfuls of pepper, one tablespoonful of sage, half a teaspoonful of salt, two teaspoonfuls of pepper, one tablespoonful of sage, half a teaspoonful of grated nutmeg, three skinned sausages and a pinch of chopped parsley; add the cooked onions and mix well together. The forcemeat is then ready for use.
This is a bread-and-sausage stuffing of the sort that went into turkey, goose or a boned bird at the Waldorf. The text as printed has an obvious typesetting fault that has to be sorted out before you measure anything.
- The duplicated line"One tablespoonful of salt, two teaspoonfuls of pepper, one tablespoonful of sage" is set twice, the second time with the salt reduced to half a teaspoonful. A compositor doubled a line. Season once, not twice.
- How much salt is meantEven taken once, a tablespoon of salt and two teaspoons of pepper are heavy for one loaf's worth of crumb, though sausage-and-bread stuffings do want firm seasoning and the printing is too garbled to trust. Start at about two teaspoons of salt and one of pepper, then taste a spoonful of the mix fried in a little butter and adjust.
- Crumb of a loafThe crumb means the soft interior with the crust cut away; a whole loaf's worth is a substantial quantity, so weigh it rather than trusting a cup measure. Soaking and wringing it out gives a paste rather than crumbs, which produces a dense, sliceable forcemeat.
- SageA tablespoon of dried rubbed sage is assertive but in keeping with the style. If you use fresh chopped sage, take about three tablespoons.
- Skinned sausagesSlit the casings and use the raw meat, breaking it up so it disperses through the bread. Three links is roughly 6 to 8 oz. A plain pork breakfast sausage is the right register; anything heavily fennelled or smoked will fight the sage and nutmeg.
- The onionsFive minutes in butter is to soften and sweeten, not to colour. Keep the heat moderate and let them go translucent; browned onion tastes quite different in a pale forcemeat.
- It contains raw porkWhether you bake the forcemeat in a dish or pack it into a bird, it must reach 165F at the centre. Stuffing inside poultry heats slowly, so check the stuffing temperature as well as the bird's.
- YieldA generous quantity, enough for a large bird or a shallow baking dish serving eight to ten. The recipe gives no oven temperature or time; treat any modern figure as your own judgement and cook until the centre reaches 165F.
Forcemeat comes from the French farce, a stuffing; English "force" is itself an alteration of "farce," with the spelling "forced meat" arriving later by folk etymology, and the word is generally said to have reached English cookery books around the seventeenth century. Grand-hotel kitchens of Oscar Tschirky's day worked with a range of forcemeats — veal, chestnut, oyster, chicken quenelle — and the label "American" here marks this one out from the French repertoire: bread crumb, pork sausage and a firm hand with sage, which is the seasoning profile of Thanksgiving turkey stuffing as it settled in the United States over the nineteenth century. The nutmeg is the older survival in the list, a legacy of the days when sweet spices went into savoury meat dishes as a matter of course. That the recipe simply ends "ready for use," with no bird named and no cooking time, suggests what kind of book this is: apparently a set of components for a professional brigade, to be finished according to whatever the dining room had ordered.