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Chicken Forcemeat for Patties
Remove the skin from a chicken, take off all the flesh from the bones and pound it to a pulp in a mortar. Soak half a pound of breadcrumbs in milk, take it out and squeeze it dry, then rub three ounces of warmed butter into it; put in the meat, add a little grated nutmeg and salt to taste; moisten with the yolks of four eggs and form the forcemeat into balls. A thin slice of ham or cooked bacon may be wrapped around each piece and is a great improvement. It is well to add a little chopped parsley.
A classic panade-bound forcemeat, written for a kitchen that assumed the cook knew what to do with it. The instructions stop at the raw ball, so the cooking is left to you.
- It is not finished as writtenThe recipe ends with raw balls of chicken and yolk. They must be poached in stock, or baked, until the centre reaches 165F before they go into the patty shells; nothing in the method cooks them.
- "Patties" means the shellIn this period a patty was generally a small puff-paste case (vol-au-vent or bouchee), filled at service. The forcemeat is the filling, not a flat cake to fry.
- The mortarA food processor does in moments what pounding did at length. Work the chilled meat in short pulses; over-processing warms the protein and the mixture turns pasty and dense.
- Chicken quantityThe recipe says only "a chicken." A mid-sized bird will yield somewhere near 1.5 lb of raw boneless meat. Weigh what you have, because the breadcrumb ratio depends on it.
- Half a pound of breadcrumbs is a lotThat is a very heavy panade against one bird's worth of meat — closer to a Victorian stuffing than a modern quenelle. If you want a finer, meatier forcemeat, start with half the crumbs and add more only if the mixture will not hold shape.
- Squeeze the crumbs properlyThe panade should be damp, not wet. Wring it out in a cloth; excess milk makes a slack mixture that will not form balls and weeps into the pastry.
- Four yolksAdd them one at a time and stop when the mixture just coheres, especially if you have reduced the crumb quantity; modern yolks may not all be needed.
- The ham wrapUse a thin slice of cooked ham or blanched streaky bacon, not raw thick-cut bacon, which will not render in the short cooking a forcemeat ball gets.
- YieldThe full quantity makes a large batch of walnut-sized balls; scale down if you are filling only a few shells.
Forcemeat — from the French farce, by way of an English folk-etymology that heard "forced" in it — was one of the workhorses of the nineteenth-century kitchen, a way of turning pounded meat and a bread panade into something that could stuff a bird, line a pie, or fill a puff-paste case. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from the 1890s, and his 1896 Cook Book is largely a compilation of the classical repertoire a large hotel kitchen was expected to command: patty fillings, sauces and garnishes recorded in shorthand for cooks who already knew the technique. The absence of any cooking instruction here is telling. This is a reference note, not a lesson, and it assumes a brigade that knew whether the balls were bound for a poaching pan or a hot oven.