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Escalloped Veal
Use baked or boiled veal; cut or chop the veal, not very fine. Soak the bread. Put a layer of veal, then bread; season with butter, pepper, and salt; add a little of the liquor that the meat is cooked in. Use finerolled crackers for top layer. Bake like oysters.
This is a leftovers dish with no quantities at all, written for a cook who already knew what scalloped oysters looked like coming out of the oven. The proportions are yours to set; what follows is what the shorthand means.
- "Bake like oysters"The reference is to scalloped oysters, a dish familiar enough in the period to serve as shorthand: layers in a buttered dish, crumbs on top, baked until the top is browned and the edges bubble. The recipe specifies neither temperature nor time; a moderate oven, in the region of 375F for 20 to 30 minutes, is a reasonable modern rendering. Since the veal is already cooked, you are only heating through and crisping the crust.
- Soaking the breadStale white bread, crusts off, soaked in milk or in the cooking liquor until soft, then squeezed lightly so it is damp rather than sodden. Too much liquid at this stage is the difference between a firm scallop and a puddle.
- "Liquor that the meat is cooked in"The broth from boiling, or the pan juices and skimmed drippings from roasting. If you have neither, unsalted chicken or veal stock does the job. Add it a spoonful at a time down the sides of the dish; the bread will take up more than you expect.
- Rolled crackersCrackers crushed with a rolling pin, the ancestor of the cracker-crumb topping. Soda crackers or plain saltines are the closest modern match. Toss them with melted butter before they go on or they will scorch dry.
- Working proportionsFor about a pound of cooked veal, figure two cups of soaked bread, three or four tablespoons of butter dotted through the layers, and roughly half a cup of liquor. That fills a 1 1/2-quart dish and serves four.
- Chop, do not mince"Not very fine" matters. Quarter-inch pieces keep the dish recognisably meat; a food processor turns it to paste and the whole thing sets like a loaf.
- SeasoningCooked veal is bland and the bread blander still. Salt more assertively than you would for a fresh roast, and consider a grating of nutmeg or a little lemon zest, both common with veal in the period.
"Escalloped" and "scalloped" are the same word in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, usually traced to the shell-shaped dishes such mixtures were once baked in, though the word has also been derived from collop and escalope; by 1900 the method had become a fixed household formula rather than a specific dish: alternating layers of something chopped and something starchy, moistened, crumbed on top, browned in the oven. Scalloped oysters were the model everyone knew, which is why this recipe can end with "bake like oysters" and consider the instructions complete. Veal was readily available in an era when dairy herds meant a steady supply of young male calves. Recipes like this one belong to the thrift tradition that fills the meat chapters of turn-of-the-century books, where the second appearance of a joint was planned for as carefully as the first.