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Truffle Forcemeat
Peel and wash one or two pounds of truffles; put them in a saucepan with a little butter, warm them, add an equal amount of calf's udder or scraped bacon and a little minced sweet herbs; when warm, turn the whole into a mortar and pound thoroughly. Sprinkle over a seasoning of pepper and salt, mix in some breadcrumbs soaked in milk, and sufficient yolks of eggs to give the forcemeat the required consistency. It is then ready for use.
Forcemeat for Roasted Turkey or Veal Take two ounces each of breadcrumbs and beef suet finely-minced, and add any seasoning required, such as sweet marjoram, lemon, thyme, finely-chopped parsley, etc., salt and pepper to taste, and moisten with egg, well beaten, to make it into a mass.
Two forcemeats in one entry: an extravagant truffle stuffing for the Waldorf's kitchen, and a plain suet-and-crumb stuffing for turkey or veal. Both are binder-and-fat formulas rather than fixed recipes, and both assume you will cook them inside or alongside something else.
- Calf's udder has vanishedUdder was used in nineteenth-century French charcuterie as a neutral, gelatinous fat that pounded smooth without greasiness. It is effectively unobtainable in the United States today. The recipe's own alternative, scraped bacon, is the practical route: scrape the flat of a knife along a slab of fatty unsmoked bacon or fresh pork fatback to make a paste, and use it weight-for-weight with the truffles.
- Truffle quantityOne or two pounds of truffles is a hotel-kitchen figure from a time when black truffles were merely expensive rather than absurd. Scaled to a domestic forcemeat, two to four ounces of fresh black truffle, or a mix of truffle and finely chopped cremini with a little truffle oil, gives a workable version at a rational cost.
- Do not brown the truffles"Warm them" means exactly that. Truffle aroma is volatile and dissipates over heat; a minute in melted butter to open the perfume is enough, and the pan should never sizzle.
- Mortar and food processorA food processor replaces the mortar, but pulse rather than run it. The mixture should be a coarse paste with visible flecks of truffle, not a purée, and prolonged blades warm the fat and make it separate.
- The soaked breadcrumbs are a panadeBread squeezed out in milk is the classic binder. Use crustless white bread, cover with milk, let it swell, then wring it nearly dry in your hands. Wet panade makes a forcemeat that weeps.
- Egg yolks by feel"Sufficient yolks" is genuinely open. Add one at a time; the finished mass should hold its shape on a spoon and not slump. Two to three yolks per pound of mixture is a reasonable starting point.
- Beef suet in the second forcemeatSuet is the hard fat from around beef kidneys, still sold by butchers and by mail; shredded packaged suet is common in Britain. Cold unsalted butter, coarsely grated, is the usual substitute, though it melts sooner and gives a less open crumb.
- It must still be cookedNeither mixture is finished food. Both contain raw egg and raw fat and are meant to be poached in a cloth, baked in a dish, or roasted inside the bird until the centre reaches 165F. Do not taste the raw mass to check seasoning; fry a teaspoonful first.
- YieldThe turkey forcemeat as written -- two ounces each of crumbs and suet -- makes only about a cup, enough for a small veal breast or a chicken. Multiply by four for a turkey.
"Forcemeat" is an English corruption of the French farce, from farcir, to stuff, and by Oscar Tschirky's day it covered everything from a coarse bread-and-suet dressing to the fine pounded pastes that lined game pies and filled quenelles. Setting the two side by side, as this page does, shows the range of a hotel larder in 1896: the truffle version belongs to the a la carte kitchen, used with the freedom of a house that could charge for it, while the marjoram-and-thyme stuffing below it comes out of the English domestic tradition that American cookbooks had long been reprinting. Calf's udder, which reads as startling now, was an accepted neutral fat for fine forcemeat in the French tradition, prized because it pounded to a smooth, pale, almost tasteless paste; it is no longer part of American butchery.