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Forcemeat of Goose's Fat Liver
Put into a mortar one pound of fat liver with three ounces of boiled and cooled calf's udder and seven ounces of bread panada, and pound them well together; add a little grated nutmeg, salt and pepper to the taste and pass it through a fine wire-sieve. Return it to the mortar again, pound it and add the yolks of five eggs, one at a time, taking care to mix one in thoroughly before adding another. The forcemeat should then be put in a basin in a cool place until wanted for use.
This is a component recipe — a farce meant to be piped, poached or baked into something else, not eaten as it stands. Two of its four ingredients need explanation before you can start.
- Bread panadaPanada is a paste of stale white crumb cooked with milk or stock until it forms a stiff mass that pulls from the pan, then cooled. Seven ounces is the finished paste, not dry bread; a rough working ratio is 4 oz crumb to 8 oz liquid, cooked down and spread thin to cool. Its job is to absorb fat as the liver warms so the forcemeat does not break.
- Calf's udderA standard neutral fat in professional kitchens of this era, poached, pressed and cooled before use. It is effectively unobtainable now; 3 oz of cold unsalted butter or well-chilled pork back fat performs the same function of enriching without adding flavour.
- Fat liver"Fat liver" is foie gras — a whole goose liver, raw, deveined. One pound is roughly one lobe of a large goose liver or a whole duck foie gras. Ordinary goose or chicken liver will make a pleasant farce but a much darker, more strongly flavoured one.
- Mortar to processorA food processor does the pounding, but keep everything cold and work in short pulses. Foie gras fat melts near body temperature, and an over-warmed farce separates into grease and grain when cooked.
- The sievePassing through a fine wire sieve — a tamis — is the step that makes this smooth rather than merely mashed. Push it through with a stiff plastic scraper or the back of a ladle; skip it and the sinew from the liver stays in.
- The yolksFive yolks into a pound of liver is a lot of binder, and the one-at-a-time instruction is the hinge. Each yolk must be fully absorbed before the next goes in or the emulsion breaks and the cooked forcemeat weeps fat.
- Cool placeA larder was cooler than a kitchen but nowhere near modern refrigeration. Cover and refrigerate at 40F or below, use within 24 hours, and cook whatever you make from it to 160F throughout — raw liver and raw yolk together do not keep.
- Yield and useRoughly 1 lb 13 oz of farce, counting the liver, udder, panada and yolks: enough to stuff a large chicken or a saddle of veal, or to make a couple of dozen poached quenelles. Test the seasoning by poaching a teaspoonful in simmering water before committing the batch, since the raw mixture cannot be tasted.
Forcemeats like this one sat at the centre of the professional repertoire Oscar Tschirky inherited from the French kitchens of the late nineteenth century, where a farce was less a dish than a building block — piped into quenelles, spread under a roast, lining a game pie, or stuffing a boned bird. The reliance on calf's udder as a bland enriching fat is the clearest period marker: it appears in Escoffier-era manuals and fell out of English-language cookery books over the following decades. Goose foie gras, by contrast, was a luxury import when this book appeared in 1896, and a recipe that pounds a pound of it into panada and yolks tells you plainly who the Waldorf was cooking for. The mortar-and-tamis method it assumes — pound, sieve, pound again — was the standard route to a smooth farce before mechanical mincers and processors.