Heat 2 tablespoonfuls of butter. Mix with 2 tablespoonfuls of flour until smooth; add 1 cup of milk; let boil up. Then add 1 cup of minced veal, some parsley, salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste. Stir in the yolks of 2 eggs. Remove from the fire; let cool. Beat the whites to a stiff froth; add to the meat. Put in a buttered baking-dish and bake twenty minutes. Serve at once.
A thick béchamel bound with yolks, lightened with beaten whites, and stretched with leftover roast veal — a small, quick soufflé of the sort designed to use up Sunday's joint. The original assumes you know your oven and your dish; here are the numbers it leaves out.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Bake at 375F, in the lower third of the oven. Twenty minutes suits a shallow dish of about 1 quart; a deeper one will need closer to 30 and will rise less impressively.
- The hinge: cool the base"Remove from the fire; let cool" is the instruction that decides whether this works. If the veal base is still hot when the whites go in, they slacken and the soufflé stays flat. Let it come to barely warm, then fold in a third of the whites to loosen, and the rest gently.
- The vealThis means already-cooked veal, minced fine — cold roast from the larder is the likely source. Raw ground veal is not what the recipe intends. Cooked chicken or turkey substitutes without any other change.
- TablespoonfulsTwo tablespoons butter to two of flour to one cup milk gives a thick sauce, which is what is wanted here: it has to carry a cup of meat and still hold air. Do not thin it toward a pouring sauce.
- NutmegPeriod recipes of this kind mean freshly grated whole nutmeg, and a small amount — an eighth of a teaspoon or less. Pre-ground nutmeg from a jar is flatter and easier to overdo.
- SeasoningSeason the base assertively before the whites go in. A cup of unseasoned white sauce plus a cup of bland veal needs about 3/4 teaspoon salt; the egg whites dilute everything that follows.
- Buttering the dishButter it thoroughly and go up the sides in vertical strokes so the mixture can climb. A dusting of fine dry breadcrumbs gives it more grip than butter alone.
- YieldServes two as a light main course, three or four as a first course. "Serve at once" is not decoration — it will begin to sink within a couple of minutes of leaving the oven.
Soufflés built on a savoury panade are generally taken to have been a familiar part of nineteenth-century French household cooking long before they became restaurant theatre, and the leftover-meat version — soufflé de veau, or of chicken, ham or fish — was one of the more practical things a cook could do with cold roast. Veal in particular suits it: mild, pale and fine-grained, it disappears into the béchamel rather than fighting it, which is why the recipe leans on parsley and nutmeg, a pairing often said to be the customary French seasoning for white meat and white sauce. This book's format — one dish a day, each tagged with a nationality — appears to reflect a strand of American cookery writing, seemingly from around the turn of the twentieth century, that treated foreign dishes as a way to vary an ordinary household repertoire, and "French" here signals technique and thrift as much as origin.