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Partridge Forcemeat
Put an equal quantity of partridge and chicken flesh cut in small pieces in a mortar and pound it; rub it through a fine hair-sieve and mix with it ten ounces of udder of veal previously boiled, pounded and passed through the sieve. When well mixed add ten ounces of bread that has been soaked in a little stiffly reduced stock, and season with salt, pepper and a little grated nutmeg. Mix the whole thoroughly, then add one teacupful of Spanish sauce reduced with essence of partridge. It is then ready for use.
A classic French-style game forcemeat, written for a brigade with a marble mortar and a stockpot always on the fire. The structure survives translation; two of the ingredients do not.
- Udder of vealBoiled, pounded veal udder was one of the neutral fat binders used in nineteenth-century forcemeat, and it has been out of the trade for something like a century. Ten ounces of cold unsalted butter, or of finely ground pork back fat, is the usual modern substitute for the richness and the setting quality.
- Spanish sauceEspagnole: a brown stock thickened with brown roux and flavoured with mirepoix and tomato, reduced until glossy. A good reduced demi-glace stands in for it. A teacupful is roughly 4 to 6 fl oz, and it should be cool and thick, not warm and loose, or the mixture will slacken.
- Essence of partridgeA concentrated stock made by simmering partridge carcasses, wings and trimmings and reducing hard. If you are boning birds for the flesh, make it from the bones; otherwise reduce a good brown chicken or game stock until it coats a spoon.
- Mortar and hair sieveA food processor does the pounding in a minute. The sieving is the step that still matters for a fine forcemeat: push the puree through a drum sieve or fine mesh to remove sinew and shot fragments. Keep everything, bowl included, refrigerator-cold so the fat does not break.
- The bread panadaThe recipe gives no weight for the flesh, so the bread-to-meat ratio is open; ten ounces of soaked bread suits a mixture meant to be piped, moulded or used as stuffing rather than eaten as a straight mousseline. Squeeze the bread hard before adding it; excess liquid is what makes a forcemeat weep.
- Buying the birdsGrey and red-legged partridge come oven-ready from game dealers in season and frozen year round; each bird yields only 4 to 6 oz of breast and leg meat, so allow three or four for a batch of this size. Feel the flesh for shot before it goes into the processor.
- Cooking and testingThis is a raw preparation for stuffing, quenelles or a raised pie, not something to taste from the bowl. Poach a teaspoonful for a minute or two to check seasoning and texture before committing the batch, and cook the finished dish to 165F.
- YieldAssuming about a pound each of partridge and chicken, the finished mixture comes to something over three pounds: enough to stuff a large bird generously, or to make several dozen small quenelles.
Forcemeat, from the French farce, is the workhorse of the classical kitchen: pounded flesh, a fat, a panada and a binding sauce, used to stuff birds, line terrines, form quenelles and pad out a garnish. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book, The Cook Book by 'Oscar' of the Waldorf, is often taken to reflect the Waldorf's kitchen as it ran under a French system, and this entry is a plain professional formula rather than a dish, the sort of thing a cook copies into a notebook. The veal udder is the period's signature: boiled, pounded and sieved, it was prized as a bland white fat that set firm without the flavour of pork, and it appears throughout Escoffier-era manuals before dropping out of the butcher's trade entirely. On an American hotel menu in the 1890s, "partridge" was a loose term, frequently covering ruffed grouse or bobwhite quail rather than true partridge, in an era before the state game laws and the Lacey Act that ended most commercial trade in wild game in the United States.