To be honest I am far more comfortable to cook vegetarian dishes from old cookbooks than I am with meat. It feels more intimidating and complex. So I have been trying to change that. Earlier this year I made an early British curry recipe from Martha Lloyds book of receipts and today I will share another meat dish - 18th century meatballs.

Recipe for stuffed turkey from John Farley cookbook The London Art of Cookery and Housekeepers Complete Assistant, published in 1783 — Recipe for stuffed turkey from John Farley cookbook *The London Art of Cookery and Housekeepers Complete Assistant*, published in 1783

Now you won’t find a meatball recipe in the 18th century cookbooks per se, at least I haven’t. Instead you will come across a term forcemeat. It comes from the French word farce, meaning stuffing. Most recipes that I looked at did just that - made the forcemeat out of various meats, spices and herbs and stuffed into something. However what I found interesting is that the recipes also often instructed to set aside some of the mixture and shape them into balls. They were then cooked separately and served around the main dish like an edible garnish. Some cookbooks also offer a separate recipe for forcemeat balls which is oddly found in the chapter for sauces.

Recipe for stewed rump beef with horseradish and meatballs from John Farley cookbook The London Art of Cookery and Housekeepers Complete Assistant, published in 1783 — Recipe for stewed rump beef with horseradish and meatballs from John Farley cookbook *The London Art of Cookery and Housekeepers Complete Assistant*, published in 1783

There were two options of cooking the meatballs. First was to boil them, which was done if you would serve it in a white sauce. I am not very partial of boiled meatballs. So I chose the second option – to fry them. This was usually served with a brown sauce.

Recipe for force-meat balls from Richard Briggs book The English Art of Cookery from 1788 — Recipe for force-meat balls from Richard Briggs book *The English Art of Cookery* from 1788

I chose a forcemeat balls recipe from John Farley cookbook The London Art of Cookery and Housekeepers Complete Assistant. It started like most of the other stand-alone forcemeat recipes with equal amounts of minced veal to suet. I am not sure where the definition lay between veal and beef in the 18th century, however my local butcher said that the difference between their veal and young beef was only a few months and it would work just fine. So that is what I used. The first time when I made the recipe I bought whole slab of suet and chopped it by hand. While I thought that I didn’t do a bad job and the suet was shredded into very small pieces, it wasn’t enough. The meatballs weren’t uniform and there were big chunks of fat in them. Not the nicest meatballs I had made. For the next attempt I blended the suet in a food processor until it started to resemble a certain pink slime. This resulted into very smooth and decadent meatballs that in texture reminded me of sausages. I would have used a mortar and pestle to achieve a similar result, however my mortar is very small and doing it by batches would have taken me approximately one extended LOTR movie. I like to divert my patience quotas into something more productive. Like trying to set in a zipper in a skirt 6 times. I am convinced that there is a special place for them in hell and will be trying out other more historical closure methods in the future such as plackets and pins. Rant over. Back to the recipe.

Sweet herbs were one of the flavourings in the recipe. As of writing, I haven’t come across any period source of the sweet herbs consistent of, so I used Townsends article on common period spices. I used a combination of thyme and dried marjoram as that what was available at my local greengrocer. Other spices included salt, pepper, nutmeg and mace. Lastly I grated a peel of 1 very small lemon. Everything was mixed together with 2 egg yolks, shaped into balls and lastly rolled in flour.

Like I mentioned before, the meatballs came out very nice in the pink slime variation. I will be keeping in mind the suet and meatball combination for the future. Often I find myself with few hundred odd grams of minced meat left over from various dishes. A meat patty placed between a certain type of bun seems like a good place to start…

Meatball recipe from John Farley cookbook The London Art of Cookery and Housekeepers Complete Assistant, published in 1783 — Meatball recipe from John Farley cookbook *The London Art of Cookery and Housekeepers Complete Assistant*, published in 1783

18th century meatballs

225 grams minced veal
225 grams minced or blended suet
¼ tsp thyme and marjoram, each
A pinch of ground nutmeg and mace, each
Salt and pepper to taste
Zest of 1 small lemon
2 egg yolks
Flour, to roll the meatballs in

Mix all the ingredients apart from flour together and shape the mixture into small meatballs. Fry them in a large frying pan over high heat until brown and cooked through. To start with add a little oil in the pan but not too much as the suet will provide plenty of fat for frying. When the meatballs were done I drained most of the fat off, added some cream to the pan, returned it back to the stove and stirring constantly until thickened made a gravy for the meatballs.

Since it is now the cooler time of the year here in Australia, I served the meatballs as a side to mashed potatoes and oven roasted stuffed mushroom.

SOURCES

Internet
Townsends article on spices (Article written 15th November, 2015, accessed on 3rd June, 2021)

Books
Davidson, Alan, The Oxford Companion to Food, Oxford University Press, 3rd Edition, 2014
Farley, John, The London Art of Cookery and Housekeepers Complete Assistant, 1783