No. 77

Baked Fish Forcemeat

Farce a Gratin pour Poisson

Put six ounces of butter into a sautoire and when hot add half a pound of finely chopped mushrooms and two ounces of chopped truffle parings. After the mushrooms have rendered their moisture, add one pound of cooked firm fish broken into fragments; as the whole becomes hot, remove it from the fire, cool partly, then add five egg-yolks and five whole eggs, seasoning with salt, pepper and nutmeg; pass it through a medium sized sieve (Fig. 98), return to the vessel and beat it well with a spoon, incorporating in two spoonfuls of tomato puree, strained through a fine sieve (Fig. 100) and half a pound of raw fish quenelle forcemeat.

← No. 76 Cream Forcemeat of Fish Elementary Methods No. 78 Foies Gras Forcemeat →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a component, not a finished dish: a rich egg-bound fish stuffing meant to line moulds, fill whole fish, or be poached in timbales. It assumes you have already made the raw quenelle forcemeat of the preceding entries.

Cool it before the eggs go inThe hinge of the whole preparation. Ranhofer says "remove it from the fire, cool partly" for a reason: five whole eggs and five yolks added to a hot pan of buttered fish will set into curds and the forcemeat will never sieve smooth. Let it come down to warm-to-the-touch, around body temperature, before adding them.
SautoireA wide, straight-sided shallow pan — what a modern kitchen calls a sauté pan or sauteuse. You want the width so the mushrooms give up their water and drive it off rather than stewing.
Truffle paringsThe trimmings left from turning truffles into neat shapes, cheaper than whole truffles and now hard to find outside tinned truffle peelings. Two ounces of finely chopped brown mushroom plus a small quantity of rehydrated dried mushroom gives the earthy note; truffle oil does not.
Passing through a sieveFig. 98 is the book's medium sieve, probably a drum sieve (tamis) of the kind worked with a wooden pestle or scraper. A food processor followed by a pass through a medium mesh strainer gets you to the same place with less labour, but do not skip the straining — the point is to catch fish sinew and any set egg.
Fish quenelle forcemeatThe half pound stirred in raw is one of the book's raw fish quenelle forcemeats, pounded raw white fish of the sort set out in the neighbouring entries (No. 76 is the cream version). It is what makes the mixture bind and lighten when cooked, so it must go in raw and cold, and the mixture should not be left standing warm afterward.
Cooked firm fishFirm means it holds together after poaching — halibut, turbot, cod cheeks, salmon. Avoid delicate flat fish, which disintegrate to paste before the sieve does its work.
Cooking the finished forcemeatThe book leaves this to the dish it garnishes. On its own, buttered moulds or a shallow buttered dish set in a water bath at 325F until the centre reaches 160F is the standard treatment for an egg-bound fish farce; as a stuffing, it must reach the same temperature inside the fish.
Yield and seasoningYou end up with roughly three pounds. Season more firmly than seems right while it is warm: butter and egg mute salt as the mixture cools and sets.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York (he was there, with a break, between 1862 and 1896), and the Elementary Methods chapter is where he sets down the building blocks the rest of the book keeps calling for. Farce à gratin is a term of art from the French professional kitchen: not a gratin in the modern baked-with-cheese sense, but a forcemeat whose base is cooked in fat before binding — the best-known version is the liver farce used for game pâtés and for spreading on croûtons. This is its fish-day counterpart, of a kind useful for the fish-day and Lenten menus a nineteenth-century hotel kitchen had to produce, and for the elaborate moulded fish entrées of the period, where a stuffing had to be smooth enough to take a mould's imprint and firm enough to unmould. The truffle parings are a reminder of how a professional kitchen used everything: the trimmings from decorative truffle work went straight into the farce.