No. 79

Chicken or Game Forcemeat with Rice for Borders, Bottoms of Dishes and Surtouts

Farce de Volaille ou de Gibier au Riz pour Bordures, Fonds de Plats et Surtouts

Prepare and unnerve one pound either of chicken or game; pass it twice through the machine (Fig. 47) to suppress all the nerves and pound it to a pulp, take it from the mortar. Put eight ounces of pate a choux, cream panada (No. 121) into the mortar, pound it thoroughly with the same weight of cooked veal udder, add the game or chicken meat, season with salt, pepper and nutmeg, two gills of well reduced cold veloute (No. 415), six egg-whites and a little cream, then add half a pound of well picked, washed and blanched rice, cooked in white broth and cooled. Mix together and keep it in a cool place. This forcemeat is used for borders, surtouts and dish bottoms.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a structural forcemeat from the classical repertoire — stiff, pale and starch-bound, made to be moulded into decorative borders rather than eaten as the point of the dish. Several of its components are recipes in their own right elsewhere in the book, and one of them is no longer sold.

Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup (about 240 ml) of cold, heavily reduced velouté. The reduction matters more than the volume: a loose sauce will slacken the farce and it will not hold a moulded edge.
"Unnerve" and "the machine"Unnerving means stripping out sinew, silverskin and tendon from the raw meat before grinding. Fig. 47 is a mechanical meat machine of the kind used to grind and force out sinew; a food processor does the work faster but will not remove sinew for you, so trim first or the finished farce will be stringy.
Veal udderCooked veal udder was the standard neutral white fat of classical forcemeat, prized because it stays pale and sets firm. It is effectively unobtainable now outside specialist butchery in a few European countries. There is no exact substitute; hard back fat or a firm butter-enriched panada changes both colour and texture.
Pâte à choux panadaNo. 121 is a cream panada made on the choux principle — liquid, butter and flour cooked to a paste. It is the binder that lets this farce survive being poached in a mould and unmoulded standing up. Eight ounces is a substantial proportion against a pound of meat, and that is deliberate.
The riceHalf a pound of blanched rice cooked in white broth and thoroughly cooled is folded in whole, not pounded. It should be soft but not collapsed, and it must be cold before it goes in or the egg whites will begin to set. Fold at the end and do not overwork.
Egg whites onlySix whites and no yolks keeps the farce white and gives a clean, firm set. Add them a little at a time with the mortar working, and hold the cream back until the mixture has taken all the white it will take without breaking.
Borders and surtoutsA bordure is a ring of forcemeat set in a mould and placed round the rim of a dish; a fond de plat is a moulded base a garnish sits on; a surtout is a raised centrepiece. Moulded forcemeats of this kind were generally poached gently in a mould rather than baked dry, which is consistent with a mixture built to be this stiff.
Test before you commitPoach a teaspoon of the finished farce in barely simmering salted water before moulding the lot. If it falls apart, more panada; if it is rubbery, more cream. Season high — a cold, starchy forcemeat tastes flat once set.
YieldAdding up the listed quantities, roughly three to three and a half pounds of finished mixture, enough for a border for a large platter or two smaller moulded bases. Keep it refrigerated and use it the same day; it is raw ground poultry with raw egg white in it.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry belongs to the long section of building blocks — panadas, veloutés, farces — that the rest of the book keeps referring back to by number. A forcemeat like this one was rarely the dish; it was architecture. Elaborately garnished platters of the period were still expected to arrive with a decorative frame, a raised base or a centrepiece holding the garnish clear of the sauce, and cooks built those in forcemeat, rice, or hardened fat. The veal udder is the clearest marker of the period: it was a standard larder item in professional French kitchens of the time, valued for being bland and white, and its disappearance from the trade is most of the reason recipes like this one now read as untranslatable rather than merely old-fashioned.