No. 70

Cooked Chopped Forcemeat with Chestnuts and with Chestnuts and Truffles

Farce Hachis Cuite aux Marrons et aux Marrons et Truffes

For each pound of forcemeat, chop up one medium shallot; fry it colorless in butter, then add to it one pound of chopped ordinary sausage-meat (No. 68); let it cook for a few minutes, and add four ounces of chopped chicken liver for every pound of the sausage-meat; season with pepper, salt and nutmeg, and let cook for a few minutes longer, then add some chopped parsley and two pounds of cooked whole chestnuts.

With Chestnuts and Truffles.—Mix one-half truffles and one-half chestnuts with this forcemeat.

← No. 69 Chopped Forcemeat for Country Sausages with Elementary Methods No. 71 Chopped Forcemeat with Truffles →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's chestnut forcemeat is a stuffing base, meant to be built once and used in poultry, galantines or as a garnish. It is unusually generous with chestnuts, and the proportions are the point.

The hinge: fold the chestnuts in last, off the heatTwo pounds of cooked whole chestnuts to one pound of sausage-meat means the chestnuts are the body of the mixture, not a flavouring. Stir them in gently at the end, once the pan is off the heat, or they collapse into paste and the texture that justifies the recipe is gone.
"Ordinary sausage-meat (No. 68)"Ranhofer means plain bulk pork sausage, simply seasoned; the book's own No. 68 gives his proportions. Modern breakfast sausage is often sweetened or sage-heavy; buy plain ground pork with visible fat, or ask a butcher for unseasoned sausage meat.
ChestnutsFresh chestnuts in the shell lose roughly a fifth to a quarter of their weight to shell and skin, so two pounds of cooked chestnuts needs something like two and a half pounds raw. Vacuum-packed peeled cooked chestnuts are the practical substitute and go in weight for weight; the canned ones in syrup do not.
Chicken liversFour ounces per pound of sausage is about three or four livers. Trim the green-tinged bits and any connective tissue, and chop them fairly fine, not as pieces of liver.
"Let it cook for a few minutes"At this stage you are only setting the pork and livers and driving off moisture, five to eight minutes over moderate heat. If the forcemeat is going into a bird or a terrine it finishes cooking there; either way it must reach 165F/74C before serving.
TrufflesThe variant substitutes truffle for half the chestnut weight, which at 1894 prices was ostentatious and today is close to unthinkable. A few ounces of truffle, or a good preserved truffle with its juice, folded in at the end gives the intent without the mortgage; truffle oil does not.
Season by tasting a test pattyNutmeg, pepper and salt are given without amounts because the book assumes you will judge them. Fry a teaspoon of the mixture flat in a pan, taste it cold as well as hot, and correct — stuffings taste flatter once chilled inside a roast.
YieldOne pound of sausage-meat built out with chestnuts gives something over three pounds of forcemeat, enough to stuff a large bird with some left over to bake separately in a buttered dish.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for most of the second half of the nineteenth century, wrote The Epicurean (1894) as a working reference rather than a domestic cookbook, which is why this entry sits in "Elementary Methods" and cross-refers to numbered forcemeats on either side of it. Farce is simply French for stuffing, and a chef's kitchen kept several graded versions on hand — coarse chopped ones like this, finer pounded ones for quenelles — to be drawn on as components. Chestnut and pork stuffing has long been standard with roast turkey and goose in both French and English practice; chestnuts were cheap and filling in a way they no longer are, and the truffle variant is Ranhofer showing the same base could be dressed up for a Delmonico's private room.