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Veal, Spanish Style, (In Casserole)
2 pounds veal, cut from leg. 1/3 cup fat salt pork or bacon. 3/4 cup fine, soft bread crumbs. 1 teaspoon salt. 1/8 teaspoon black pepper.
Few grains cayenne. 1 teaspoon chopped parsley. 2 cups cooked and strained tomato pulp. 1/2 green pepper finely chopped 1/2 onion finely chopped. 1 egg slightly beaten.
Soda.
PROCESS: Remove all fat tissue and skin from veal; remove skin from pork. Pass both through meat grinder twice, add crumbs and seasonings, except tomato, onion and green pepper; mix thoroughly and bind together with egg. Shape in balls the size of a small egg. Roll in flour and sauté a rich brown in Cottolene made hot in an iron frying pan. Heat tomato pulp, add one-eighth teaspoon soda, one-half teaspoon salt and one-half tablespoon Worcestershire Sauce. Turn into a warm casserole, add chopped pepper and onion. Dispose balls over sauce, rinse frying pan with a little boiling water or Brown Stock and pour over balls. Cover and let simmer in a moderate oven two hours. Serve from casserole, or arrange on a hot platter and surround with a border of boiled rice sprinkled with finely chopped parsley; place a spray of parsley in each meat ball.
A ground-veal meatball braise from a weekly menu book, written for a coal-range kitchen and a covered earthenware pot. Most of the work is in the grinding and the sauce; the oven stage needs the heaviest editing.
- "In casserole"In 1900s American usage the casserole is the vessel — a lidded earthenware or enamelled pot that goes from oven to table. Any covered Dutch oven or braiser works, and the instruction to "serve from casserole" is the whole point of the dish.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening, one of the first industrial lard substitutes, and long discontinued. Use lard, a neutral oil, or clarified butter for the browning; the recipe is a period advertisement as much as a technique.
- The salt pork measurement"1½ cup fat salt pork or bacon" is an awkward volume measure for a solid; 1½ cups diced comes to roughly 8 ounces against 2 pounds of veal, a high but not impossible proportion for a bound meatball. If you prefer a leaner mixture, 4 to 6 ounces ground with the veal still gives lean leg meat the fat it needs.
- Grinding twicePassing veal and pork through the plate twice is what makes these hold together with a single egg and three-quarters of a cup of soft crumbs. If you buy ground veal, run it through a second time or pulse it briefly in a processor, or the balls will crumble in the sauce.
- The pinch of sodaAn eighth teaspoon of baking soda in the tomato pulp neutralises acid, a trick that turns up often in recipes of this period. It works, but it also flattens flavour and can foam; with modern passata a pinch of sugar does the same job with less loss.
- Oven and time"Moderate" is usually read today as somewhere around 350F. Two hours at that heat risks drying out egg-sized veal balls already browned in fat; 325F for about an hour, covered, should be enough to cook them through and marry the sauce.
- Green pepper and onion raw into the sauceThey go in uncooked and rely on the long braise to soften. If you shorten the oven time, sweat them in the frying pan after the meatballs come out, then deglaze as directed.
- YieldThe mixture makes roughly 20 to 25 small-egg-sized balls, serving four to six with the rice border.
This is the kind of dish that got called "Spanish style" in American cookery around 1900 — the label meant tomato, green pepper and onion, with a shake of cayenne, rather than any connection to Spain. 52 Sunday Dinners was published by the makers of Cottolene, the cottonseed-oil shortening that appears here by name, and belongs to a genre of promotional cookbooks in which a manufacturer supplied a full year of menus around its own product. Veal from the leg was cheap, lean and bland, which is why it is ground with salt pork for fat and braised in a sharply seasoned tomato sauce; the Worcestershire is doing the work that a stock reduction would do in a restaurant kitchen. The rice border with a parsley spray stuck in each meatball is pure turn-of-the-century service, a domestic echo of the elaborate garnishing then taught in cooking schools.