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Veal Loaf
1 pound cold roast veal finely chopped, 1/2 pound sausage meat, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons breadcrumbs, 1/2 cup stock or gravy, 1 egg, salt and pepper to taste.
Mix veal, sausage meat, Crisco, and breadcrumbs together, season liberally with salt and pepper, and add egg. Mix thoroughly and add gravy or stock gradually until it is thoroughly moistened. Form into a short thick roll, cover lightly with flour, or, when economy is not an object, coat with egg and breadcrumbs. Bake in moderate oven for 1 hour, basting occasionally with hot Crisco, and serve hot with brown sauce.
A leftovers dish: it assumes you already roasted a veal joint and have gravy in the pantry. Two adjustments matter most — the oven number and an internal thermometer, since the loaf contains raw sausage meat.
- Moderate ovenRead this as roughly 350F. An hour at about that temperature suits a loaf of this size; check that the centre reads 160F before serving.
- CriscoThe book was published by the makers of Crisco, hence its appearance in nearly every recipe. Any solid vegetable shortening works, as does butter, though butter browns faster when used for basting.
- Cold roast vealThe recipe depends on already-cooked meat, chopped fine rather than ground — a knife or a few short pulses in a processor gives better texture than mincing. Cooked pork shoulder or cooked chicken thigh substitutes acceptably if veal is hard to source.
- Sausage meatThis means bulk sausage, casings removed. It is the only raw meat in the loaf and supplies most of the fat; the egg and breadcrumbs do the binding.
- Stock or gravyAdd it a spoonful at a time. The mixture should hold a shape when pressed but not slump; cooked veal absorbs liquid unevenly, so half a cup is a ceiling rather than a target.
- Shaping and coatingA free-formed roll on a shallow baking tray browns on all sides; a loaf tin steams it. The flour dusting is the plain version, the egg-and-crumb coating the richer one — either wants basting every 15 to 20 minutes to keep the surface from drying.
- Brown sauceA simple espagnole or a reduced pan gravy thickened with a brown roux. The loaf is dense and lightly seasoned by modern standards, so season the sauce assertively.
- YieldRoughly a pound and a half of loaf, serving four. It slices better after 10 minutes' rest and is good cold the following day.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced in 1911 — which explains why a veal loaf calls for two tablespoons of it in the mixture and more for basting, where an older English cookbook would have said suet or dripping. The dish itself belongs to the long tradition of the household meat loaf, a way of turning the cold remains of a roast into a second hot dinner; the raw sausage meat is there to supply the fat and savour that cooked veal has already lost.