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Forcemeat Balls for Soup
Chop one breakfast cupful of any cooked meat, add a saltspoonful each of thyme and salt, and half the quantity of pepper, one teaspoonful of lemon juice, a few drops of onion juice and one teaspoonful of minced parsley. Beat the yolk of an egg and add sufficient of it to moisten the meat. Roll the mixture into balls about the size of walnuts, put them into a deep plate, dust over with flour, and shake the plate with a circular motion to get the balls well covered. Put them in an omelet pan with a tablespoonful of butter over a moderate fire, shaking it occasionally so that the balls are cooked all over, and when done and a good brown color, they are ready for use.
A thrifty use for leftover roast, and one of the few Waldorf recipes that assumes you already have cooked meat on hand. The measurements are old-fashioned but all translate cleanly.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup — roughly 8 to 10 fl oz. Take it as about a level cup of chopped meat, somewhere in the region of 5 to 6 oz by weight depending on how finely it is cut.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So 1/4 tsp each thyme and salt, and 1/8 tsp pepper.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine rasp and use the liquid that collects, or press a few gratings in a sieve. It gives onion flavor without wet pulp that would loosen the mixture.
- Chop, do not puréeHand-chop the meat or pulse it briefly. A food processor run continuously turns cooked meat to paste, and the balls come out dense and gummy rather than tender.
- Only enough yolk to moistenThis is the hinge. One yolk is more than most cups of meat need; add it a little at a time and stop as soon as the mixture just coheres when squeezed. Too much and the balls slump in the pan and break up in the soup.
- Omelet pan, moderate fireAn omelet pan here is simply a shallow, sloped skillet — the slope lets you shake the balls without a spoon. Moderate fire is medium heat; the butter should foam steadily, not brown fast.
- Yield and servingAbout 12 to 16 walnut-sized balls, enough to garnish six bowls of clear soup. Add them to the hot soup in the tureen or at the table rather than leaving them to sit in simmering broth, where they may soften.
Forcemeat — from the French farce, stuffing, by way of a folk-etymology that reads it as meat "forced" through a sieve — was one of the workhorses of the nineteenth-century kitchen, appearing as stuffing, as quenelles, as a lining for pies, and here as a soup garnish. Clear soups were expected to arrive with something in them, and a good hotel kitchen kept a repertoire of garnishes: royale custards, tiny pastas, julienned vegetables, and balls like these. That Oscar Tschirky's book offers them made from "any cooked meat" is telling: the point of such a forcemeat ball was to make Monday's roast reappear as Tuesday's consommé.