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Chicken Forcemeat
Take sufficient meat from a cooked chicken so that after it has been pounded and passed through a fine hair-sieve there will be one pound of the puree; add to this ten ounces of veal udder, boiled and pounded the same as the chicken, and mix well, adding another ten ounces of panada made with some good stock and seasoning with grated nutmeg, salt and pepper to taste. Pound all the foregoing well together and moisten with reduced allemande sauce until it is of good consistence. Take a small piece and plunge it into boiling water or stock, and if it is too thick add a little double cream or a little more of the sauce. It is then ready for use.
A classical quenelle base rather than a finished dish: pounded cooked chicken, a fat, a starch binder and enough sauce to bring it to piping consistency. Two of the four components are no longer bought casually, and the poached test dumpling is the step that decides whether the whole batch works.
- Do the test dumplingPoaching a small piece of the mixture before committing the batch is the hinge of the recipe; the book directs you to plunge it into boiling water or stock. It tells you whether the forcemeat is too thick, in which case the recipe says to loosen it with a little double cream or a little more sauce.
- Veal udderBoiled and pounded veal udder (tétine) was the standard soft fat for fine forcemeats and is effectively unobtainable now outside specialist butchers. Cooks today use an equal weight of cold unsalted butter, or chilled pork back fat, worked in the same way; both give the smooth richness the udder was there to supply.
- PanadaA cooked starch paste used as a binder, not a bread stuffing. Oscar's version here is made with good stock; the usual kitchen forms are flour and stock cooked to a thick roux-paste, or breadcrumbs soaked in stock and dried out over heat. It must be cooked and then cooled completely before it goes into the mixture.
- Allemande sauceA velouté enriched with egg yolk and cream and sharpened with lemon, reduced here until thick. It is worth making properly rather than substituting plain cream, since the yolk contributes to the set.
- Hair sieve and mortarThe pounding and sieving produce a purée with no fibre in it. A food processor gets most of the way, but pushing the purée through a drum sieve or fine mesh afterwards is what gives the classical texture; skip it and the quenelles will be grainy.
- Keep everything coldThe mixture is an emulsion of lean protein and fat. Work over ice, and if the butter or fat begins to soften and look oily, chill the bowl before continuing or the forcemeat will break when poached.
- QuantityOne pound of chicken purée plus ten ounces each of fat and panada, before the sauce, gives roughly two and a quarter pounds of forcemeat.
- SeasoningSeason more assertively than seems right when tasting the raw mixture, since it will be poached in unsalted or lightly salted liquid. The poached test piece is the only honest guide to salt level.
Forcemeat of this kind, the farce fine of the professional kitchen, was a workhorse rather than a dish: it went into quenelles, into the linings of raised pies and timbales, into stuffings for boned poultry and into the garnishes of consommé — pounded, sieved, bound and poached in spoon-shaped dumplings. The proportion given here, with the fat and panada together outweighing the meat purée, follows the lines of the French classical formula. Veal udder appears as a mild fat, softer than any other available, melting into the purée without the graininess of suet; it disappeared from English-language cookbooks over the twentieth century. The presence of a recipe like this in a general cookbook of 1896 is a reminder of how much of it was written for a brigade rather than a household cook: it produces no meal, only a component that presumes several other recipes will call for it.