Cut cooked veal into small pieces; season and moisten with a rich beef gravy. Pour into a deep pie-dish. Then make a cover with mashed potatoes moistened with cream; sprinkle with bits of butter and let bake until brown. Serve hot.
September 9 — No. 9
Swiss
A shepherd's-pie construction built on leftover roast veal, written in the telegraphic style of a daily calendar cookbook. The gaps are all quantities, and the one thing worth getting right is the gravy.
- Quantities to work fromAbout 1 1/2 lb cooked veal, cut in 1/2-inch dice, with 1 1/2 to 2 cups gravy and roughly 2 lb potatoes for the topping fills a 2-quart dish and serves four to six. The original gives none of this.
- "Rich beef gravy"This means a reduced brown gravy with body, not thin stock: a roux-based sauce made from beef drippings and stock, reduced until it coats a spoon. If it is too loose the filling floods the potato lid and the crust will not brown.
- Moisten, do not drownThe veal should be coated and just bound, with no free liquid standing in the dish. Cooked veal is lean and takes up little further liquid, so extra gravy simply boils up through the topping.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe asks only that it "bake until brown." Use 375-400F for 30 to 40 minutes, until the filling bubbles at the edges and the potato is patched with brown; the contents are already cooked, so this is a reheating and browning step.
- The potato coverMash while hot, beat in warm cream so the potato stays smooth, and keep it stiff enough to hold a fork-drawn pattern. The ridges are what catch the butter and colour.
- SeasoningVeal is mild and needs more than salt and pepper to carry a whole dish. Nutmeg or mace, lemon zest, or chopped parsley and onion softened in butter are all seasonings commonly paired with veal in cookery of this era; taste the filling before it goes under the lid.
- If the top will not colourSlide it under the broiler for two or three minutes at the end, or brush the potato with a little melted butter or beaten egg first.
The label often says more about the compiler's imagination than about the country named. Veal is prominent in Swiss and Austrian cooking, and using yesterday's roast under a potato crust belongs to the same family of thrift dishes as English shepherd's pie and French hachis Parmentier. The recipe specifies cutting the cooked veal into small pieces rather than mincing it, so the texture is chunkier than a modern mince-based pie. Recipes of this brevity assumed a household that already had cooked meat, a stockpot and a pan of gravy on hand, and needed only a suggestion for what to do with them.