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Veal Forcemeat Stuffing for Fish
Make four ounces of bread panada and mix with it four ounces of finely-minced cooked veal, two ounces of chopped fat salt pork and suet, the juice of half a lemon, one-half teaspoonful each of powdered savoury and thyme and a little ground mace; add a seasoning of salt and pepper and bind the whole with a beaten egg. The stuffing is then ready for use. Of course it can be made in larger or smaller quantities, according to the size of the fish. Veal Forcemeat (for Boiled Turkey).
Take one-half pound of lean veal, chop it fine with a small quantity of beef suet, a few oysters, and two anchovies, and add some breadcrumbs mixed with the yolks of eggs and a few herbs. When the turkey is prepared for boiling, stuff the crop with the forcemeat, and boil.
Two Waldorf forcemeats, one built on cooked veal for fish and one on raw veal for boiled turkey. Both depend on a panada, and that is where most modern attempts go wrong.
- Bread panadaBread panada is a paste of stale crumb simmered with milk or stock until it pulls away from the pan in one mass, then cooled. The recipe does not say whether the four ounces is dry bread or finished paste; read as finished paste it is roughly 1/2 cup, from about 2 oz of dry crumb. It gives the forcemeat body, and without it the mixture is coarser and holds together less well.
- The hinge: cool the panadaBeat in the egg only when the panada is cold. Warm panada scrambles the egg and the stuffing will not bind.
- Salt pork and suetTwo ounces total, chopped fine and cold. Ask a butcher for beef suet; block shredded suet from the baking aisle works, though it is often mixed with flour. Trim the rind from the salt pork and taste the mixture before adding more salt.
- Savoury"Powdered savoury" is almost certainly dried summer savory, sold with the other dried herbs. Half a teaspoon each of savory and thyme against roughly 10 oz of solids is an assertive seasoning for a plain baked fish.
- MaceGround mace is the aril, the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than the kernel. A pinch is enough; nutmeg can stand in, used sparingly.
- YieldThe fish stuffing as written makes roughly 1 1/2 cups, enough for a whole fish of about 3-4 lb. The turkey forcemeat cannot be quantified, since the breadcrumbs, suet, oysters and egg yolks are all left unmeasured; make only as much as the crop will hold.
- ChoppingA food processor will do the mincing, but pulse rather than run it. Veal worked to a paste with the fat gives a dense, rubbery stuffing.
- Oysters and anchoviesIn the turkey version the oysters are presumably shucked and raw when chopped in, and the anchovies do the salting, as no salt is called for. Two anchovies in period usage means two whole salted fish, so about four modern fillets. Rinse salt-packed anchovies; jarred fillets in oil can go in as they are.
- Cooking the stuffed birdThe turkey version puts raw veal, raw oyster and egg yolk inside a bird. Cook until the centre of the stuffing itself registers 165F, not just the breast meat; stuffing in a poached bird heats slowly and will lag well behind.
Forcemeat, from the French farce, is the older and broader idea behind what English cookery came to call stuffing: minced meat and fat bound with a starch paste, used to fill, to stretch and to hold a shape. The panada base is standard nineteenth-century French forcemeat technique, and the Waldorf book -- compiled under Oscar Tschirky, the hotel's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef -- follows that grammar even for plain American dishes. Boiled turkey with an oyster forcemeat, now nearly extinct, was still a respectable formal dish in the United States in the late 1800s: the bird was poached rather than roasted and often served under a white or oyster sauce, and here it is the crop that is stuffed. The pairing of oysters with poultry reflects how cheap and plentiful East Coast oysters still were when this book was published in 1896.