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Veal Cheese
Pound separately in a mortar equal quantities of veal and tongue, boiled and sliced; pack in a jar in alternate layers, moistening each layer with butter. Begin with a layer of veal, then tongue, etc., so that when the cheese is cut it will look variegated. Press it in jar until very solid, then pour over the top melted butter. Keep well covered in a dry place. This makes very nice sandwiches.
CHAPTER XVI.
This is a potted meat — a "cheese" only in the old sense of a pressed, sliceable block — and the whole method rests on storing cooked meat at room temperature under a butter seal. That is the part that cannot be carried over.
- Why the butter seal failsMelted butter poured over packed meat creates an oxygen-poor layer over a low-acid, moist, high-protein food. That is the exact condition in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate, and the toxin they produce leaves no smell, taste or visible sign. Commercial potted meats are retorted at temperatures a home kitchen cannot reach.
- "A dry place" is not a temperatureThe recipe gives no holding temperature and no keeping time. Boiled veal and tongue, handled at length in a mortar and packed by hand, can also pick up Listeria and staphylococci from the pounding and packing; both multiply readily at room temperature, and staphylococcal toxin is not destroyed by later reheating.
- Sandwiches make it worseThe intended use is uncooked — sliced cold and eaten straight. Nothing in the process after the initial boiling brings the meat back above a safe temperature, so any contamination introduced during pounding, layering or pressing goes to the table as it is. If you want a variegated pressed-meat sandwich filling, use a current recipe with refrigeration and a stated keeping time.
- "Cheese" and "jar"No dairy is involved beyond the butter. The name follows the older usage in which any firm mass pressed in a mould and cut in slices was a cheese — compare head cheese and lemon cheese.
- Pound separately in a mortarThe instruction to work the veal and the tongue apart from one another is the only reason the finished block shows stripes; a food processor would do the same job, but combining the meats at any stage destroys the effect the recipe exists for.
- TongueWhole beef tongue is still sold by butchers and needs long simmering and peeling before it can be sliced. The recipe says only "tongue, boiled"; a cured, pink-fleshed tongue would give the strongest contrast against pale veal. Pre-sliced deli tongue was not what this book meant.
- The stray line"CHAPTER XVI." at the end is a page-break artefact from the original printing, not part of the method.
Potted meats like this one are the tail end of a long English tradition: before canning, cooked meat was pounded fine, packed hard to drive out air, and sealed under butter, which kept moisture and — it was hoped — spoilage at bay for weeks in a cool larder. The "variegated" layering of pale veal against tongue is a decorative flourish of the same instinct that produced marbled brawn. Refrigeration, and a growing understanding of botulism, retired it.