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Forcemeat for Filling Fish Cutlets
(Paris.) Chop finely, 2 shrimps, 6 oysters, 1 tablespoonful of parsley, 6 small mushrooms, and the rind of a lemon. Add 1 cup of bread-crumbs, a little nutmeg, salt, pepper, and the yolk of an egg. Beat and stir well. If not needed at once, it may be put on ice for a day or two, but it is better made fresh.
A stuffing, not a dish in itself: it goes inside a slit fillet or between two thin pieces of fish before breading and frying. The proportions are loose in the original, so read it as a ratio rather than a formula.
- The quantities are vague"2 shrimps" and "6 oysters" depend entirely on size, and the recipe gives no guide to proportion. If you want a working figure, something like 2 oz shrimp and 2-3 oz shucked oysters against the cup of crumbs will behave, though larger shrimp would make "2 shrimps" a much smaller quantity than that.
- CrumbsA cup of fresh soft crumbs absorbs far less liquid than a cup of dry ones. Use fresh crumbs from day-old bread and add them gradually, stopping when the mixture just holds together on a spoon.
- Rind of a lemonThis means the zest only, grated or pared and minced. Any white pith turns the forcemeat bitter, and a whole lemon's worth is assertive against six oysters.
- Mushrooms"6 small mushrooms" most likely means the small cultivated white buttons known as champignons de Paris, though the recipe does not specify. Chop them fine and, if they are watery, sweat them briefly and cool before mixing, or the stuffing will loosen in the pan.
- The egg yolk is the binderOne yolk holds this together, and the mixture must be cooked through inside the fish for that binding to set. Stir until it is genuinely cohesive rather than crumbly; a second yolk is warranted if the crumbs are dry.
- Do not keep itThe suggestion to hold it on ice for a day or two assumed a cold larder and same-morning shellfish. Chopped raw oysters and shrimp bound with raw yolk are a poor keeping mixture; make it the day you use it, as the recipe itself concedes is better.
- YieldThe original gives no yield; the quantities suggest enough to fill roughly four to six fish cutlets or fillets. Season a little more boldly than seems right, since it will be tasted through a layer of mild white fish.
Forcemeat is the English term for a seasoned ground mixture used to fill, bind or line, sharing a root with the French farce. This one is a modest household version of a classic seafood farce: shellfish, mushroom, lemon and crumbs, bound with yolk, the same logic that underlies the grander farce de poisson pounded with cream in restaurant kitchens. The mushrooms are the small cultivated buttons long grown in the limestone quarries under the city, and the presence of oysters in a stuffing rather than on the half shell reflects how cheap and ordinary they still were on both sides of the Atlantic at the turn of the century.