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Veal Patties
Cut one pint of cooked veal into dice, and put into a stewpan with onehalf pint of white sauce and one small teaspoonful of lemon juice. Place on the fire and stir until well heated. Fill the shells and serve.
A short assembly recipe that assumes you already have cooked veal, a béchamel and baked pastry cases on hand. The name is misleading to modern eyes: nothing here is shaped into a patty.
- "Patties" means pastry shellsIn turn-of-the-century usage a patty is a small puff-pastry case — a patty shell or vol-au-vent — filled with a creamed mixture. The final line, "fill the shells," is the only clue the original gives. Frozen puff-pastry shells or small baked tart cases stand in directly.
- Measuring meat by the pintVeal is measured by volume, as cooked ingredients often were. A pint of dice works out somewhere around three-quarters of a pound to a pound of cooked meat, depending on how closely it packs. Cut it about 3/8 inch — larger and the filling will not sit in a small shell.
- White sauceHalf a pint is one cup. The period standard is a medium béchamel: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. Veal stock in place of some of the milk gives a better result than milk alone.
- The hinge: heat, do not stewThe veal is already cooked. Stirring "until well heated" means two or three minutes over moderate heat — long simmering squeezes the meat dry and stringy, and the sauce tightens as it reduces.
- Seasoning the book leaves outThere is no salt, pepper or nutmeg here, and the sauce as written will taste flat. Season the béchamel before the veal goes in, and add the lemon juice off the heat so it stays bright.
- Warm the shellsCold pastry against hot filling softens quickly. Crisp the shells in a 350F oven for five minutes and fill them just before serving, not in advance.
- YieldAbout three cups of filling — enough for eight or so small shells, serving four as a light lunch or first course.
Recipes like this belong to the economy of a household that roasted or boiled a large joint and expected the cook to find a second, more elegant life for it. The croquette-and-patty chapter of an American cookbook of this period is essentially a chapter on leftovers dressed in French clothing: cold meat diced, bound in béchamel, and served in puff pastry so that it arrives at the table looking like a made dish rather than a remainder. Veal suited the treatment particularly well — mild and pale, in an era when calves were a by-product of the dairy herd, it took on whatever the sauce and the lemon gave it. The same formula appears across the period with chicken, sweetbreads, oysters or lobster substituted, which is why the instructions here are so brief; a cook using this book had already met the method elsewhere and needed only the proportions.