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Forcemeat for Pies
Chop half a pound of fat bacon with one pound of veal with the skin and fat taken off, add a little powdered herbs and mushroom catsup, two eggs, and a little salt to season. Mix well, roll up into balls and use for pies or any made dishes.
A plain veal-and-bacon forcemeat, meant to be dropped into a raised pie or a stew rather than cooked on its own. It is a component, not a dish, and the whole of its success is in the mincing and the salt.
- The hinge: texture"Chop" here means chopped fine by hand or put twice through a coarse plate of a grinder, not pureed. A food processor will turn this into paste in about fifteen seconds; pulse in short bursts and stop while the meat still shows grain, or the balls will be dense and rubbery.
- ProportionsHalf a pound fat bacon to one pound lean veal is one part bacon to two of veal, which is what keeps the balls from drying, though the bacon is not all fat so the true fat fraction is somewhat under a third. Do not substitute lean or streaky supermarket bacon without adding fat; unsmoked pork back fat or fresh pork belly is probably nearer to the "fat bacon" intended here.
- Powdered herbsDried herbs ground fine: thyme, marjoram, savoury and sage are the usual candidates in period forcemeats, though the recipe does not specify. About a teaspoon in total for this quantity; more and it reads as stuffing rather than forcemeat.
- Mushroom catsupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquid, not tomato ketchup. It is still sold by British grocers; a tablespoon of it, or of Worcestershire sauce thinned with a little soy, gives the same savoury depth. Add it sparingly, since it carries a good deal of salt.
- Seasoning checkWith raw veal you cannot taste the mixture. Fry a teaspoon of it flat in a pan, taste that, and correct the salt in the bowl before rolling.
- Size and cookingRoll to about an inch, which from this quantity gives a great many small balls; roll larger if you want fewer. They must reach 160F at the centre, so if they are going into a pie that bakes briefly, poach or brown them first; in a long-baked raised pie or a simmered stew they will cook through as they are.
- YieldAbout a pound and a half of mixture before the eggs. It keeps a day covered in the refrigerator and freezes raw.
Forcemeat balls were a fixture of English and Anglo-American pie-making long before Oscar Tschirky set them down for the Waldorf kitchen: they filled the gaps between joints of meat in a raised pie, absorbed gravy, and stretched expensive flesh with cheap fat. The word is generally traced to the French farce, stuffing, and is often said to have been anglicised to "forcemeat" by around the seventeenth century, though the record is not precise; the same idea survives in quenelles, boudin and the modern meatball. Veal was one of the common bases, because it is mild, pale and gelatinous, binding without asserting itself against the pigeon, beef or oyster it accompanied. Mushroom catsup, the other period marker here, was the household umami bottle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, made by salting mushrooms down and boiling the drawn liquor with spice; tomato ketchup only captured the word later. That this entry appears with no instruction beyond "use for pies or any made dishes" suggests, though it cannot prove, a readership that already knew what a made dish required.