No. 71

Chopped Forcemeat with Truffles

Farce Hachis aux Truffes

Add to the chopped forcemeat for ordinary sausage-meat (No. 68), one-half pound of raw or preserved black truffles cut in slices, and mix in also half a gill of Madeira wine for every pound of sausage-meat. In winter the truffles may be added two or three days in advance, not in summer, as they are liable to mold.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a component recipe rather than a finished dish: Ranhofer assumes you have already made his plain sausage-meat (No. 68) and are enriching it for stuffing poultry, lining a pâté, or forming into small sausages. Two things need translating -- the wine measure and the sheer volume of truffle.

Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz) of Madeira per pound of sausage-meat. Use a dry or medium Sercial or Verdelho rather than a sweet cooking Madeira, which will read as cloying against the pork.
Half a pound of trufflesNote that Ranhofer specifies the half pound for the batch of sausage-meat as a whole (the Madeira, not the truffle, is given per pound), so the exact ratio depends on how much No. 68 you have made. It is in any case a restaurant quantity from a period when black truffles were more freely used in professional kitchens than they are now. At current prices, 1 to 2 oz of fresh black truffle per pound of meat gives a clearly truffled forcemeat; make up the difference with the truffle's soaking or canning liquor rather than truffle oil, which tastes synthetic in a raw mixture.
"Preserved" trufflesRanhofer means canned or bottled truffles sterilised in their own juice, still sold under names like truffes brossées or 1er cuisson. They are milder than fresh and considerably softer, so slice them cold and fold them in at the very end so they do not smear.
The two or three days in advanceThe point of the wait is diffusion -- the truffle perfume moves into the pork fat. It works, but do it in the refrigerator at 40F or below, not in a winter larder, and keep the total to 48 hours. Ranhofer's warning about summer molding is really a warning about an unrefrigerated kitchen.
Keep everything coldThe Madeira loosens the mixture, and a warm forcemeat will break and weep fat when cooked. Chill the meat, the bowl and the truffles, and stop mixing as soon as the wine is absorbed.
Test before you commitFry a teaspoon of the mixture flat in a pan and taste it for salt. A forcemeat seasoned correctly as plain sausage can taste underseasoned once the truffle goes in, so check rather than assume.
Cooking it throughWhatever the final form -- stuffing, terrine, or small sausages -- take the pork to 160F on an instant-read thermometer. Slices of truffle do not change the timing, but a densely packed terrine will need a water bath to avoid a dry rim.
YieldThe recipe is proportional and scales freely. One pound of finished forcemeat is roughly enough to stuff a 4 lb chicken or to fill one small terrine serving six as a first course.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) after many years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its "Elementary Methods" chapter is built as a chain of variations: a plain sausage-meat gets chestnuts in one entry, truffles in the next, each entry assuming the one before it. Truffled forcemeat -- farce aux truffes -- was a standard luxury lining and stuffing in nineteenth-century French service, appearing inside galantines, boned poultry, timbales and raised pies, and Madeira turns up repeatedly through the book as a seasoning for such mixtures. The seasonal note about mold is the most revealing line on the page: it points to a kitchen where the calendar, rather than a thermostat, governed what could be prepared several days ahead.