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CANNELON (a la Francaise)
Mince a pound of underdressed beef and half a pound of bacon, and mix them well together, season with a little pepper, salt, and nutmeg, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, and the same of marjoram and thyme. Bind all together with beaten egg, form the mince into a roll, tie some white oiled paper round it to keep it in shape, and bake it in a moderate oven. When sufficiently cooked, take off the paper, put the roll on a dish, and pour good brown gravy round it. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 3d., exclusive of the cold meat.
A Victorian rechauffe: a way of turning the remains of a joint into a hot dish. Two words need decoding before you start, and the rest is straightforward.
- "Underdressed beef"This means cold roast beef that was taken from the oven underdone, not raw meat. The whole point of the dish is that the meat cooks a second time in the roll, so beef that was already well done will end up dry and grey.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F (180C). Three-quarters of an hour at that heat suits a roll of about 1.5 lb, which is what this quantity makes; the beef is already cooked, but as the mince has been handled and reshaped take the centre to at least 160F.
- Oiled paperBaking parchment brushed with oil does the job, wrapped snugly and tied at both ends like a cracker. Foil is easier to seal but steams the surface, so unwrap for the last ten minutes if you want any colour.
- The bacon is the fatCooked lean beef has given up much of its fat and juices. The half pound of bacon is doing structural work as much as seasoning, so use a fatty streaky cut and mince it with the beef rather than dicing it small.
- BindingOne large beaten egg is enough for this quantity. If the mixture will not hold a roll, a couple of tablespoons of fresh breadcrumbs soaked in stock will bind it without making it pasty.
- Brown gravyRead this as a properly made brown gravy or reduced brown stock rather than pan drippings, since a baked roll of cold meat produces almost none. Anything thin will simply pool round the dish.
- Yield and costServes four with a vegetable. The "3d." is the cost of the bacon, egg and herbs only, the beef being reckoned as already paid for.
Cannelon comes from the French for a small tube or rolled thing, sharing a root with canne and cannelle, and in nineteenth-century kitchens it was applied to forcemeat shaped into a cylinder, whether baked, fried or wrapped in pastry. Its place in a Victorian dictionary of cookery may owe less to French cooking than to the English problem of the large joint: a household that roasted a sirloin on Sunday faced cold beef for days, and manuals of the period gave considerable space to rechauffes, dishes that reheated yesterday's meat without admitting to it. The note of "probable cost, 3d., exclusive of the cold meat" points the same way. Books of this kind addressed cooks working to a household budget, and the appeal of a cannelon was that it cost a few pence, arrived at table hot and shaped and sauced, and looked nothing like the joint it came from.