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Goose Forcemeat
Pick off all the meat from the goose left over from yesterday, cut into small dice pieces and keep on a plate. Cut one ounce cooked lean ham, six canned mushrooms, and place on the plate with the goose meat. Heat an ounce of butter in a saucepan, add one small, finely chopped onion and gently brown for eight minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile, then add one ounce flour, stir well while heating for two minutes. Pour in three gills demi-glace and two gills of tomato sauce. Mix well and let reduce to half the quantity, add the meat, ham and mushrooms, season with a teaspoon cayenne and one saltspoon grated nutmeg; mix well and let gently cook for twenty minutes, mixing occasionally. Dilute two egg-yolks with two tablespoons sherry and add to the force; mix well while cooking for three minutes, remove, place on a plate, let cool off, and use as required.
A leftovers dish in the old Delmonico's manner: cooked goose bound in a rich brown sauce, finished with an egg-and-sherry liaison. It is a filling rather than a dish in itself, which is why the recipe ends without telling you what to do with it.
- Do not boil after the yolks go inThe two yolks diluted with sherry are a liaison. Add them off the boil and hold the pan at a bare tremble for the three minutes specified; a simmer will curdle the sauce into grains.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Three gills demi-glace is 1 1/2 cups, two gills tomato sauce is 1 cup — 2 1/2 cups of liquid reduced to about 1 1/4 cups before the meat goes in.
- The cayenne is almost certainly wrongThe cayenne looks high — A full teaspoon of cayenne in this quantity would be very hot for most palates, and pepper quantities in period printed recipes are often unreliable. Start with 1/8 teaspoon and taste.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Grate the nutmeg fresh; pre-ground is flatter and the quantity here is small enough that it matters.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, which a household kitchen of the period would have had to make for itself. Concentrated demi-glace bases or a well-reduced brown stock both work; if using a commercial base, dilute it thinner than the label says, since the sauce is reduced by half again.
- Canned mushroomsCanned button mushrooms were a common pantry item in this period. Fresh mushrooms, sliced and dried out in a little butter first, give better texture — roughly 2 ounces for the six called for.
- Cooking the rouxEight minutes of gentle browning on the onion, then two minutes on the flour, is the point of the dish's colour. Do not rush either; scorched flour cannot be corrected once the stock goes in.
- Yield and useThe recipe does not specify how much goose meat to use, so the yield varies; the sauce alone reduces to about 1 1/4 cups. Cooling stiffens the mixture, which suits shaping for croquettes or rissoles, or filling small pastry cases.
- Reheated gooseThe meat is already cooked and gets twenty minutes in simmering sauce, which is ample. Refrigerate the finished forcemeat promptly and use it within two days rather than holding it as "required" for longer.
"Forcemeat" comes from the French farce, a stuffing — the word has nothing to do with force and everything to do with filling a cavity, a pastry case or a croquette. This entry belongs to the strand of turn-of-the-century professional cookery that treated leftovers as a scheduled part of the week: the phrase "left over from yesterday" suggests, though it does not prove, a book organised around consecutive daily menus, so that a roast goose on one page might become croquettes on the next. Demi-glace and a tomato sauce made from scratch both were standing preparations a professional kitchen kept on the stove and a home cook had to build from nothing. The egg-yolk-and-wine liaison is older than the roux-based sauce it thickens here, a technique inherited from French practice and used to give brown sauces a final gloss and body without further reduction.