Skip to main content
Main

Forcemeat, to Force Fowls or Meat

A forcemeat made from ham or gammon, veal or fowl, suet, onion, parsley, lemon peel, spices, bread, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Forcemeat, to Force Fowls or Meat

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Shred the ham, veal, or fowl and chop the onion and parsley finely.

  2. Mix the meats with suet, lemon peel, salt, nutmeg or mace, and pepper.

  3. Pound the mixture in a mortar and bind it with 1 or 2 beaten eggs.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ham or gammon, veal or fowl
Provides the main body and meaty flavour of the forcemeat.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the forcemeat moist and rich after cooking.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and set when cooked, holding its shape.

The step that matters

Pound the mixture and bind it with beaten eggs. Pounding breaks the meat into a fine, even paste so it holds together. Beaten egg proteins set when heated, so the amount of egg matters: too little leaves the mixture crumbly, and too much makes it slack and wet.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, veal, beef, onion, parsley, lemon, nutmeg):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, veal, beef, onion, parsley, lemon, nutmeg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More forcemeat recipes

Balls 27Fish 25Veal 24Chestnut 18Hare 17Suet 13 See all 56 →

You might also like

Beef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipes