No. 73

Cooked and Raw Game or Chicken Forcemeat for Lining Cases for Sweetbreads, Chicken, Etc

Farce Cuite et Crue de Gibier ou de Volaille pour Garnir les Caisses de Ris de Veau, de Volaille, etc.

Have one pound of raw chicken or game fillets cut in dice, fry them in four ounces of butter, seasoning with salt, pepper and nutmeg, and let cook for a few minutes, then set away to cool. Begin by pounding the meat, then add gradually to it eight ounces of butter, or calf's udder in small bits, and remove the whole from the mortar. Pound ten ounces of flour and milk panada, (No. 121), add to it eight egg-yolks one by one, and then the cooked meat, and continue pounding for ten minutes longer rub all through a fine sieve, and mix to this forcemeat one pound of raw quenelle forcemeat (No. 89); either of chicken or game. Poach one of the quenelles and rectify if necessary as explained (No. 60); four spoonfuls of cooked fine herbs may be added to this forcemeat.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a component, not a dish: a rich half-cooked, half-raw forcemeat stiff enough to be spread inside paper or pastry cases that will then be filled with sweetbreads or creamed chicken. Escoffier-era kitchens made it by the mortar; a food processor does the same work in a fraction of the time, provided everything stays cold.

The hinge: test-poach before you commitRanhofer's instruction to poach a single quenelle and correct the mixture is the whole quality control step. Drop a teaspoon of the finished farce into barely simmering salted water for three or four minutes, taste it, and adjust salt, nutmeg and binding before you line a single case.
PanadaNo. 121 is a flour-and-milk panada, a stiff flour-and-milk paste of the white-sauce/choux family. Ten ounces is a weight, not a volume, so weigh it; it must be cold before pounding or the butter will melt out.
Calf's udderAn orthodox 19th-century forcemeat fat, valued for its mildness and pale colour. It is effectively unobtainable now. Use the full eight ounces of butter instead, which the recipe already offers as the alternative.
Raw quenelle forcemeatNo. 89 is a separate preparation of raw chicken or game forcemeat. It supplies the raw protein that helps set the mass when the lined case is cooked, so it should not simply be replaced with more cooked meat.
Mortar to processorWork the cooked meat and butter first, then the panada with the yolks, then combine and pass through a fine sieve or drum sieve. Chill the bowl and the blade; if the mixture warms up the butter breaks and the farce turns greasy.
Eight yolks is not a typoThe yolk count looks extravagant by modern standards, but with a pound of raw quenelle farce and ten ounces of panada it is a working proportion. The mixture is cooked through in the case, so raw yolks are not a concern here.
Fine herbs"Cooked fine herbs" means a fines herbes mixture — parsley, chervil, chives, tarragon — sweated in butter and cooled, not raw chopped herbs. The recipe does not specify the size of its spoon, so treat four spoonfuls as approximate.
YieldThe listed weights add up to something over three pounds of forcemeat, enough to line a large number of small cases. Halve or quarter it for home purposes; it keeps a day covered and refrigerated, and it pipes better after resting.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows how such a kitchen was organised: nothing here is a finished plate, only a building block cross-referenced to three other numbered preparations. Forcemeats of this type — half cooked meat pounded with butter, half raw quenelle farce, bound with panada and yolks — are often traced to the French farce à gratin and farce fine traditions associated with Carême earlier in the century, and they existed because a brigade could make them in bulk in the morning and use them all service long. Calf's udder as a forcemeat fat, unremarkable in 1894, is the clearest marker of how far the butcher's counter has narrowed since. The mortar-and-sieve labour implied by "continue pounding for ten minutes longer" suggests how much hand work such a preparation demanded.