Chop cooked veal with some onion, parsley, thyme and 1 clove of garlic; season with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Add some chopped ham, lemon-juice and 2 eggs. Mix with bread-crumbs and melted butter. Fill into small paté shells; rub with butter and beaten egg. Place a paper over the top and let bake in a moderate oven. Serve with tomato-sauce.
A leftovers dish written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: no quantities, no timings, and an assumption that you have cooked veal and pastry cases on hand. A few decisions have to be made for you.
- Work out proportions yourselfThe original gives no weights at all. A workable ratio is about 1 lb cooked veal and 4 oz ham to 2 eggs, roughly 1 cup fresh breadcrumbs and 2-3 tablespoons melted butter. The mixture should hold together when pressed but not be stiff.
- "Chop cooked veal"This is a use-up recipe for the remains of a roast or braised joint, not raw meat. Cooked veal chopped by hand or pulsed briefly keeps texture; a food processor run too long turns it to paste.
- Paté shellsSmall baked pastry cases -- tartlet shells of shortcrust or puff, blind-baked. Muffin-tin tartlets or bought vol-au-vent cases both work. The filling is already cooked, so the shells only need enough oven time to set the eggs and brown the glaze.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as around 350F. Twenty to twenty-five minutes is generally enough for the egg to set through small shells.
- The paper over the topNot decoration. The egg-and-butter glaze colours long before the centre is hot, and a loose sheet of parchment keeps it from scorching. Lift it off for the last few minutes if you want more colour.
- Season assertivelyCooked veal is bland. Salt, pepper, nutmeg, garlic and lemon juice are all doing real work here; taste the mixture before it goes into the shells.
- Yield and servingAt the proportions suggested above, that would fill about a dozen small shells -- a first course for six, or lunch for four. A plain tomato sauce, thin enough to pool on the plate rather than sit on the pastry, suits it well.
Small filled pastry cases of this kind sit in a long European tradition of the petit paté -- minced seasoned meat, bound with egg and crumbs, baked in its own crust and served hot as an entrée. The book's habit of assigning a nationality to each of its dishes is more a marketing device than a claim of authenticity: what marks this one as "Italian" to an early twentieth-century compiler is chiefly the veal, the garlic and the tomato sauce. The recipe's real subject is thrift. Cold roast veal was a common remnant in a household that bought large joints, and mincing it with ham, herbs and crumbs was a familiar way to bring it back to the table looking like a new dish rather than a reheated one.