No. 67

Chopped Forcemeat for Game Pie

Farce Hachis pour Pate de Gibier

Prepare a pound of lean veal or pork forcemeat without nerves or skin, a pound of fat pork, and season with salt, white pepper and red pepper; mince finely one ounce of onions and two ounces of carrots; fry them both in butter with thyme and bayleaf, adding the parings and carcasses of some game; moisten with a pint of white wine, and reduce till dry, then moisten once more with a pint of broth and reduce again till dry; now take out the bones, thyme and bayleaf, and pound up all the meat as well as the vegetables; rub this through a sieve and mix it in with the farce.

← No. 66 Chopped Forcemeat for Game Galantines Elementary Methods No. 68 Chopped Forcemeat for Ordinary Sausages →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a component, not a finished dish: a seasoned pork-and-veal farce enriched with a double-reduced game essence, meant to line and fill a raised game pie. The whole point of the method is the reduction, so start there.

The hinge: reduce twice, all the wayThe wine goes in and cooks down until the pan is nearly dry, then a pint of broth goes in and does the same. Each reduction concentrates gelatin and roasted flavour from the bones into the vegetables and pan glaze, which is what you are actually harvesting. Stop short of dry and you get a wet forcemeat that will weep and slump inside the pie.
"Forcemeat without nerves or skin"Ranhofer means meat trimmed clean of sinew, silverskin and membrane before grinding. Sinew will not break down and shows up as gristle in a sliced pie, so trim harder than feels necessary.
Fat porkMost likely fresh pork back fat or fatback rather than salt pork or bacon. A pound of fat to a pound of lean forcemeat is a 1:1 ratio; it reads as extravagant now, and dropping to about a third fat by weight still binds well without tasting lean.
Red pepperCayenne. Use it in the tenth-teaspoon range for two pounds of meat: it is there as a background warmth, not heat you can name. For salt, about 1.5 percent of the total meat and fat weight, roughly 15 g per kilo, is the usual working figure.
Parings and carcassesBones, trim and necks from whatever game the pie is built on. Brown them well in the pan with the onion and carrot before the wine goes in; unroasted bones give a pale, thin essence and the reductions have nothing to concentrate.
Pounding and sievingThe mortar-and-tammy step is a food processor now. Pulse the reduced meat and vegetables to a paste, then push it through a fine sieve to catch bone splinters and carrot fibre, and fold that paste into the ground farce. Keep everything near freezing throughout or the fat smears and the mixture breaks.
Test the seasoningThe original gives no tasting step. Fry a teaspoon of the finished farce flat in a pan, cool it a moment and taste; seasoning always reads weaker hot than it will in a cold pie slice, so correct on the cold side.
YieldRather more than two pounds once the game essence is in, enough to line and fill one large raised pie or two smaller ones. It keeps a day covered and refrigerated before baking, and freezes raw.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer was chef at Delmonico's in New York for roughly three decades, in two spells between the early 1860s and his retirement in the mid-1890s, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his kitchen manual set in type: numbered elementary preparations first, then the dishes that call on them by number. That is why this entry reads like a specification rather than a recipe for a household. Numbers 66 through 68 walk through a family of chopped forcemeats, one for game galantines, one for game pies, one for ordinary sausages, each a variation on the same lean-and-fat base. The game pie itself belongs to an older French charcuterie tradition of the raised pâté or pâté en croûte, in which the crust is generally said to have served first as a cooking vessel and preservative rather than as something to eat. The insistence on building a separate essence from the carcasses is in keeping with professional kitchen practice of Ranhofer's period, in which a pie made from a brace of grouse was expected to taste of grouse throughout, not merely to contain some.