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Forcemeat of Ham
Chop fine about two pounds of cooked lean ham, put into a mortar, and pound well. Put one pound of breadcrumbs and one pint of milk into a saucepan, place it over a slow fire, and boil until the crumbs are soft and smooth; add a little cayenne, one-half pint of brown sauce, one teaspoonful of salt and one tablespoonful of mustard. Place it one side to cool, and then make into a mass with the yolks of four eggs. It will then be ready for use, either as a border, or for game pies, or for quenelles.
A classic panada-bound forcemeat: ham pounded to paste, stiffened with a bread-and-milk base, bound with yolks. It is a component rather than a dish, so the useful decisions are about texture and how you cook it once it is made.
- The hinge: the panada must be thickOne pound of crumbs to one pint of milk should cook down to a stiff, glossy paste that pulls away from the pan in one mass. If it stays loose, the forcemeat will not hold a border or a quenelle shape, and no amount of extra yolk will save it.
- BreadcrumbsRead this as soft fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, not dried packaged crumbs, which would drink the milk instantly and turn to cement. If you only have dry crumbs, use roughly half the weight and add milk as needed.
- UnitsA pint is 2 cups, a half pint 1 cup. Oscar's measures are US, not imperial.
- Brown sauceEspagnole or a reduced demi-glace. A well-reduced dark stock-and-roux sauce is the intent; anything thin will slacken the mixture.
- MustardA tablespoon of dry English mustard powder is the likely reading for a period kitchen, and it is what gives the mixture its bite. Prepared mustard would add liquid and much less heat; if you use it, expect a milder result.
- SaltHold back the teaspoon of salt until you have tasted. Cured ham varies widely in saltiness, and the brown sauce is salted as well.
- The mortarA food processor does this in under a minute. Pulse the ham to a coarse paste first, then add the cooled panada and pulse again; over-processing after the yolks go in makes the mixture pasty and gluey.
- Cooking itNothing here is cooked through as written. Quenelles want to be poached in barely trembling salted water or stock, around 170-180F, for 8-12 minutes depending on size, until they are firm and set at the center. As a pie lining or border it cooks with the pie.
- YieldThe ingredients weigh something over four pounds before cooking, so expect roughly four pounds of finished forcemeat, enough to line and garnish a large raised game pie or to make several dozen small quenelles. Keep it covered and cold and use it within a day or two; it can be frozen before poaching.
Forcemeat, from the French farce (stuffing), was one of the load-bearing preparations of the nineteenth-century professional kitchen: a seasoned paste of pounded meat and a starch binder, used to line pies, to stretch expensive game, to build ornamental borders around a dish, and, rolled into ovals, to become quenelles. The bread-and-milk binder is the panade, and pounded, panada-bound forcemeats of this type are treated at length by Carême and later by Escoffier. A ham version would have been thrift as much as flavor: lean trimmings from a boiled or baked ham, awkward to slice, could go into the mortar. That it appears in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book is a reminder that the volume reflects a hotel kitchen with a mortar and a stockpot of espagnole to hand.