Chop cooked veal and boiled ham; place in a well-greased mold alternate layers of veal, ham and hard-boiled eggs. Sprinkle with pepper, mace and chopped parsley. Moisten with beef-stock and let bake in the oven. Serve cold, sliced very thin, garnished with watercress.
April 17 — No. 17
English
A terrine in all but name, written in the telegraphic style the whole book uses. The instructions assume you already know how a pressed meat loaf behaves, so the two things worth adding are proportions and the fact that it must be weighted while it cools.
- The hinge: press itNothing here binds except the reduced stock, so the loaf will crumble under the knife unless it is weighted as it chills. Cover the mould with foil, set a smaller pan on top with a couple of tins in it, and refrigerate overnight before turning out.
- Use gelatinous stock"beef-stock" here would have been a home-boiled stock, often stiff with gelatine from bones and knuckle. Commercial cartons will not set. Reduce a good stock until it gels firmly when a spoonful is chilled on a saucer, or reinforce it with a veal bone or a little unflavoured gelatine.
- ProportionsFor a 1.5-quart loaf pan, roughly 1.5 lb cooked veal, 12 oz boiled ham, four hard-boiled eggs and about a cup of stock. That gives ten to twelve thin slices as a cold first course.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake covered at 325F for 45 minutes to an hour, just long enough to heat the loaf through and set the stock; everything in it is already cooked, so longer only dries the veal.
- "Chop"Chopped by hand rather than ground. A coarse dice keeps some mosaic of veal, pink ham and egg on the cut face, which a grinder would blur.
- MaceThe dried outer coat of nutmeg, milder and less resinous. A quarter teaspoon of ground mace is enough for this quantity; it was the standard warm spice for English potted and pressed meats and reads as slightly old-fashioned rather than wrong.
- Cooked vealThe recipe assumes yesterday's roast or boiled veal. Starting from raw, poach a shoulder or breast in stock until tender and let it cool in the liquid, then dice; that poaching liquid becomes the moistening stock.
- ServingCold, sliced as thin as it will hold, with watercress. It keeps three or four days refrigerated and cuts better on day two than on day one.
Pressed loaves of cold veal and ham belong to the English cold table, the sideboard spread of raised pies, potted meats and galantines that supper and luncheon depended on before refrigeration. The combination of pale veal, salt-cured ham, hard-boiled egg and a spoonful of mace is the same one that fills a veal-and-ham pie; strip away the hot-water pastry and you have this. Its presence in a book that draws a dish a day from a different country says something about how such collections worked: England was reliably represented by something cold, thrifty and made of yesterday's joint. Books of this kind circulated widely in American households around 1900, offering variety at a time when leftover roast meat was a daily fact rather than an occasional one.