No. 72

Codfish Forcemeat for Stuffing Fish

Farce de Morue Fraiche Pour Farcir les Poissons

Chop up finely one pound of codfish free of bone and skin. Break three eggs in a saucepan, season with salt and pepper and add one gill of cream and a teaspoonful of butter, cook on the fire stirring the same as for scrambled eggs, let this cool, have also two ounces of bread crumbs soaked in milk and well squeezed. Put four ounces of butter in a sautoire with two finely chopped shallots, fry without coloring, then add the fish, four ounces of mushrooms and an ounce of truffles both to be finely chopped; season with half an ounce of spiced salt (No. 168), and into it stir the scrambled eggs and the bread crumbs. Cover the saucepan and cook in the oven for an hour, after removing beat in a spoonful of chopped parsley and four raw egg-yolks. This preparation can also be used for rissoles and coulibiacs.

← No. 71 Chopped Forcemeat with Truffles Elementary Methods No. 73 Cooked and Raw Game or Chicken Forcemeat for →

For the Modern Kitchen

A rich fish forcemeat from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen, meant to be packed into a whole boned fish before it is baked or braised. It reads oddly because it is built in three separate stages that are only combined at the end.

"Morue fraiche" is fresh codDespite the word morue, which usually signals salt cod, this specifies fresh fish. Using salt cod would make the forcemeat inedibly salty, particularly with the spiced salt added later.
MeasuresA gill is half a cup. Four ounces of butter is one stick; two ounces of breadcrumbs is roughly a cup of soft crumbs before soaking.
SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow with a lid. Any heavy ovenproof pan with a cover does the job, since the mixture goes from stovetop to oven in the same vessel.
Spiced salt, No. 168Ranhofer's own blend: fine salt with pepper, nutmeg, cloves, bay, thyme and similar aromatics ground together. Half an ounce is about a tablespoon, and it is the dominant seasoning here — substituting plain salt at the same weight will give you a very salty, flatly seasoned farce. Mix a small batch of seasoned salt or reduce sharply and season by taste.
The oven hourCovered, in a moderate oven; Ranhofer gives no temperature. The point is to set and dry the mixture, not to brown it, so keep the lid on and stir once or twice if the edges are catching.
Cool before the yolksThe four raw yolks go into the cooked mixture off the heat and, ideally, after it has dropped below scrambling temperature. They are the binder that sets when the stuffed fish is cooked, so the forcemeat must always be baked through afterwards — it is not a finished dish.
Truffles and mushroomsAn ounce of truffle is a garnish of flavour rather than substance; a teaspoon of truffle paste or a few drops of good truffle oil stirred in at the end approximates it. Cremini or chestnut mushrooms, chopped fine and squeezed of moisture, keep the mixture from going wet.
YieldUpwards of two pounds of forcemeat -- enough to stuff a large boned fish, or to fill a coulibiac or a batch of small rissoles.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the Delmonico's kitchens in New York for over thirty years and published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of that cooking, French in method and vocabulary even when the fish came off American docks. The "Elementary Methods" chapters gather the building blocks a professional brigade needed on hand: stocks, garnishes, and a long series of numbered forcemeats like this one, each cross-referenced so a cook could assemble a dish from parts. Farce — the same root as the theatrical sense, meaning something stuffed in — was central to grand-service cookery, where a whole fish was boned, filled, reshaped and sauced so that it arrived at table looking untouched. The closing note that it will also serve for rissoles and coulibiacs is characteristic: the coulibiac, a Russian fish pie taken up by French chefs in the nineteenth century, was fashionable in exactly the restaurants Ranhofer was writing for.