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Pheasant Forcemeat
Chop twelve ounces of pheasant and eight ounces of chicken meat together, put it in a mortar, pound it and then pass it through a fine hair-sieve. Pound and pass through the sieve ten ounces of boiled udder of veal, mix it with the pounded meat, and work it up with twelve ounces of bread panada; sprinkle over it a little grated nutmeg, salt and pepper, and mix the whole thoroughly with a teacupful of reduced Spanish sauce. Test a small piece of the forcemeat by poaching it in boiling water, and if it is too stiff mix a little more of the sauce with it.
A classic French-style game forcemeat, scaled for a hotel kitchen and written for cooks who already knew what a panada and a Spanish sauce were. It is a component, not a dish: the base for pheasant quenelles, galantines, ballotines, or the stuffing of a boned bird.
- The hinge: test before you commitThe poached trial piece at the end is the whole method. A forcemeat that is too stiff eats dry and cracks when poached; too slack and quenelles collapse in the water. Poach a teaspoon of it in barely simmering (not boiling) water for a couple of minutes, taste for seasoning and texture, and correct with more sauce before shaping anything.
- Udder of vealBoiled veal udder was one of the neutral fat-and-collagen binders used in nineteenth-century French forcemeats, giving a pale, tender, springy set. It is effectively unobtainable now outside specialist butchery. Hard back fat or fresh pork fatback is the usual modern substitute, though the result is richer and slightly heavier.
- Bread panadaPanada here means bread crumb soaked in milk or stock and cooked down to a stiff, smooth paste, then cooled — not dry breadcrumbs. The twelve ounces is most likely the made paste rather than dry bread, though the recipe does not say. It should be cold and firm before it goes into the meat, or the mixture will loosen.
- Spanish sauceEspagnole: the brown mother sauce built on brown roux and brown stock. "Reduced" means cooked down to a heavy, glossy, near-glaze consistency, which is why a small amount carries so much flavour. A period teacupful is somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a cup — start at the lower end, since the recipe expects you to add more to loosen.
- Mortar and hair sieveThe pounding-and-sieving sequence produced a texture no grinder of the period could match. A food processor does the work, but keep everything very cold and pulse rather than run it, or the fat breaks and the forcemeat turns grainy. The sieving step — pushing the purée through a drum sieve or tamis with a plastic scraper — is what gives the silky finish and is worth not skipping.
- Temperature disciplineMeat, fat, panada, sauce and bowl should all be refrigerator-cold throughout. Emulsified forcemeats are liable to split if the mixture is allowed to warm while it is being worked.
- YieldRoughly 2 lb 10 oz of finished forcemeat before the sauce, enough to stuff a boned pheasant with a good deal left over for quenelles.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name fronted this 1896 volume, was not a cook by trade, and the book reads as a record of what the Waldorf's brigade actually did — French classical technique transcribed for an American readership. Forcemeat of this kind, a godiveau or farce fine, was foundational kitchen work: pounded, sieved, bound and tested, then turned into quenelles for garnishing soups, into the lining of a game pie, or back into the bird it came from. Pheasant appeared on grand hotel menus through the autumn and winter, and much of it may well have been farmed or imported rather than shot, though the point is hard to establish with certainty; either way, a bird's worth of trim was too valuable to waste. The veal udder is the detail that dates the recipe most precisely: it was a routine larder item in French and Anglo-American professional kitchens of the period and had all but disappeared from cookbooks by the middle of the twentieth century.