Meat Balls
To three-fourths of a cupful of the head meat, chopped very fine, add a pinch of thyme, the grated peal of half of a lemon, one raw egg, and flour enough to bind all together. Form in little balls the size of a hickorynut; serve them in a little hot butter.
A garnish rather than a dish in its own right: these are the forcemeat balls that float in mock turtle soup, made from the meat picked off a boiled calf's head. The recipe assumes you have that head already cooked, which is the one thing a modern cook has to solve first.
- "Head meat"The lean meat, cheek and tongue trimmings from a calf's or pig's head that has already been cooked. Butchers will still order a half head, but any well-cooked, gelatinous cut chopped fine will behave the same way: braised veal shoulder, shin, or cheek.
- The meat must already be cookedNothing in this recipe brings raw meat to temperature. Three-quarters of a cup of finely chopped cooked meat is the starting point; the only raw element is the egg, which sets in the pan.
- "Peal"Peel. Grate only the yellow zest of the half lemon and none of the white pith, which turns bitter.
- "Flour enough to bind"With one egg to three-quarters of a cup of meat, expect roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons. Add it a spoonful at a time until the mixture just holds a shape; too much and the balls go dense and pasty.
- SizeA hickory nut is a little under an inch across, so these are small — about a rounded teaspoon each.
- "Serve them in a little hot butter"The wording may mean either frying them in butter or sending them to table in hot butter. If you fry them, roll them tight and turn them in foaming butter over moderate heat until browned and firm, which is enough to set the egg through.
Forcemeat balls are the fossil remnant of mock turtle soup, the great nineteenth-century substitute for a dish most households would never see. Real turtle soup carried prized green fat and gelatinous meat; cooks approximating it reached for a calf's head, which boils down to a similarly rich, sticky, faintly gluey broth, and then used the picked meat for garnish so that nothing was wasted. The lemon peel and thyme are standard for the genre — a bright note against a heavy, long-simmered stock. That a general-purpose American household book still prints this without explaining what "the head meat" is tells you the whole calf's head procedure was assumed knowledge. Within a generation or two it was not, and the head largely disappeared from the domestic kitchen along with the whole-animal butchery that put it there.