No. 64

Chicken Liver, Fine Baking Forcemeat

Farce Fine de Foies de Volaille a Gratin

Heat four ounces of grated lard, add to it one pound of sauted cold chicken livers; pound well half a pound of bread-crumb panada (No. 121), add the livers a little at the time, pounding continually, fry in butter one tablespoonful of shallots, adding to them two tablespoonfuls of mushrooms, half a tablespoonful of truffles, both chopped, and a teaspoonful of chopped parsley; when all these ingredients have fried lightly add to them two gills of espagnole sauce (No. 414); let get slightly cold, then stir in one whole egg and three yolks; season with salt, pepper and nutmeg, add the chicken livers, rub all forcibly through a sieve and mix this preparation with one pound of quenelle forcemeat.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a component, not a dish: a rich liver forcemeat meant to be piped, spread or stuffed into something else and then cooked. It only makes sense if you read it alongside the numbered recipes it calls for.

"A gratin" is not a gratinIn this vocabulary farce a gratin means a pounded liver stuffing bound with panada and egg; the name is usually explained by the browning of the livers and the fond left in the pan rather than by any browned crust. Nothing here goes under a broiler on its own.
Grated lardThis means firm pork back fat or fresh leaf lard, chilled hard enough to grate; ask a butcher for fatback.
The cross-referencesNo. 121 panada is bread crumb cooked with liquid to a stiff paste; No. 414 espagnole is the brown mother sauce; the quenelle forcemeat is a separate pounded veal or poultry farce. You need all three made and cooled before starting, and the recipe is unusable without them.
MeasuresTwo gills of espagnole is one cup. Treat the shallot, mushroom and truffle amounts as proportions rather than precise measures.
How far to cook the liversSaute them hot and fast until just firm and barely pink at the center, then cool completely. Livers cooked grey and hard will not pound to a smooth paste, and the whole preparation is cooked again once it is stuffed or poached.
Cool before the eggs"Let get slightly cold" is the hinge. If the sauce and vegetable mixture is still warm when the egg and yolks go in, the eggs set in threads and the finished forcemeat will be grainy rather than binding cleanly.
The sieveRubbing forcibly through a fine sieve was the only route to a smooth farce. A food processor gets most of the way there, but a pass through a drum sieve or fine-mesh strainer afterwards is what removes the connective tissue and gives the texture the book expects.
Yield and useAs written this makes something over three pounds, far more than a household needs. It keeps two days covered in the refrigerator, or freezes well; use it to stuff boned poultry and game birds, to line a terrine, or spread on croutons under roasted small birds. Scale to a quarter for a single dish.
TrufflesHalf a tablespoon of chopped truffle was a routine seasoning in a Delmonico kitchen. A teaspoon of good truffle paste, or an equal quantity of dried mushroom soaked and chopped fine, keeps the savor without the cost.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and the "Elementary Methods" chapter is essentially the grammar of that kitchen: panadas, forcemeats, quenelles and sauces built up by number so that later recipes could simply refer back to them. Farce fine de foies de volaille a gratin belongs to the French professional repertoire Ranhofer trained in, where a liver forcemeat of this kind served as the standard luxurious lining for game pies and terrines and as the spread on the crouton set beneath a roast woodcock or snipe. The term a gratin is generally traced to gratter, to scrape, from the scraped-up browned residue of the pan in which the livers were sauteed. The unstinting pound of livers, half pound of panada and pound of quenelle forcemeat show a kitchen cooking for a dining room rather than a family, which is why almost every quantity in the book wants dividing before it reaches a home stove.