Chop cooked veal to a fine mince; butter a baking-dish and put alternate layers of veal, rice and tomato-sauce until dish is full. Cover over with fine bread-crumbs; pour over some melted butter and let bake in the oven until brown. Serve with French peas.
May 9 — No. 9
Belgian
A leftover dish in calendar-cookbook shorthand: no quantities, no temperature, no timing. The structure is a gratin, and it succeeds or fails on how wet the layers are before it goes in the oven.
- The hinge: keep it moistCooked veal that has been minced fine has no fat or juice left to give. Use enough tomato sauce that the layers look almost too saucy going in, or the dish bakes to a dry crumb under its crust.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. For a 2-quart dish, roughly 1 lb cooked veal, 3 cups cooked rice and 2 to 2½ cups tomato sauce, built in three layers each, serves four to five.
- OvenNo temperature or time is stated; the recipe says only 'bake in the oven until brown.' Everything in the dish is already cooked, so a moderate oven, around 375F for 25 to 35 minutes, until the crumbs are brown and the centre is hot through, is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- "Chop to a fine mince"Hand-chopping with a knife or a few short pulses in a processor. Run it too long and you get a paste that packs into a solid layer instead of staying loose.
- Tomato sauceIn period cookery this generally meant a plain cooked tomato sauce, sometimes thickened with a little roux, rather than a herbed Italian pasta sauce. Passata simmered with butter, onion and salt is closer to that register.
- The riceIt must be fully cooked before it is layered. Nothing in the oven stage will hydrate raw or undercooked grains.
- Crumb toppingDry fine crumbs, not fresh soft ones, and melted butter poured over rather than mixed in, which is what gives the mottled brown crust the recipe is after.
- French peasPetits pois à la française: small peas braised in butter with shredded lettuce, a few spring onions and a spoonful of water. Frozen petits pois work perfectly well here.
Calendar cookbooks like this one gave a household a dish a day, each tagged with a nationality, and the tags were often looser than they looked. What the recipe really documents is the economics of a period when a roast was cooked for one meal and expected to reappear in two more: cooked meat minced, stretched with rice, bound with sauce and browned under crumbs. It is often said that such dishes were a common remedy for the leftover joint, though the pattern is easier to assert than to document. The instruction to serve it with French peas might be read as a plain economy dish given a continental frame by its garnish and its title, but that is interpretation rather than evidence.