Chop cold veal. Mix with some sweetbread and mushrooms chopped. Season with salt, pepper and lemon-juice. Add a sprig of parsley and a little onion chopped fine. Mix with a beaten egg and bread-crumbs; sprinkle with nutmeg. Form into croquettes. Dip in beaten egg and fine bread-crumbs and fry in deep hot lard. Serve hot with a cream sauce.
A late-Victorian way of using up cold roast veal, thickened only by egg and crumbs rather than the panade a modern cook would expect. The recipe gives no quantities, so treat the proportions below as the working framework.
- Working proportionsAbout 2 cups finely chopped cooked veal, 1/2 cup cooked sweetbread, 1/2 cup cooked mushrooms, 1 egg and 1/2 to 3/4 cup dry breadcrumbs makes eight croquettes and serves four. Add crumbs only until the mass just holds when squeezed.
- The hinge: chill before shapingEgg-and-crumb binding is weak, and a soft, warm mixture is liable to burst in the fat. Refrigerate the mixture at least an hour, shape, then chill the shaped croquettes again for 30 minutes before breading.
- Sweetbreads need preparationThey are generally a special order from a butcher, sometimes available frozen, and the recipe appears to assume them already cooked. Soak in cold water, blanch, cool, then peel off the membrane before chopping. If you skip them, use an equal volume of mushrooms and the dish still works.
- Mushrooms must be dryRaw mushrooms release a great deal of water into a mixture held together by egg alone. Saute them until the pan is dry and let them cool completely before mixing.
- Frying fat and temperatureDeep lard is authentic and excellent for this, but any neutral fat at 360-375F works. Fry two or three at a time so the temperature holds; three to four minutes gives colour without drying the already-cooked meat.
- Nutmeg and lemonA sprinkle of nutmeg on veal was standard period seasoning and should be light -- a few scrapes for the whole batch. The lemon juice is there to lift the flatness of reheated veal; a teaspoon or two is enough, more will slacken the mixture.
- The cream sauceNo recipe is given; a cream sauce was a standard preparation of the period: a white roux of equal butter and flour, milk or cream, and salt. Pool it under the croquettes rather than over, so the crust stays crisp.
A la reine -- "in the queen's style" -- was nineteenth-century French menu shorthand for a mixture of white meat, most often chicken, bound in a rich cream sauce; the same phrase survives in the bouchee a la reine still sold in French bakeries. Croquettes themselves come from croquer, to crunch, and by the 1880s they were common in both restaurant and household cookery on both sides of the Atlantic, turning yesterday's cold joint into something that could be sent to table without apology. Veal with sweetbreads and mushrooms is a pairing found widely in the French repertoire of the period. The day's dish is filed under France, but the technique of stretching leftover roast with egg, crumbs and hot fat was thoroughly Anglo-American domestic practice.