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German Toast
Take the remains of any cold stew, or fricassee. Mince it finely, and mix with a pint of it, including the gravy, two well-beaten eggs, one table-spoonful of chopped parsley, and one onion, finely minced. Stir the mixture over a slow fire until it is reduced by one-third. Let it get quite cold. Spread it on pieces of toast, brush it over with beaten egg, strew bread-crumbs on the top, and bake in a moderate oven. Just before serving, squeeze a little lemon-juice over the toast. Time to bake, a quarter of an hour, or until the toast is thoroughly heated through.
A Victorian way of using up yesterday's stew: the meat is minced, bound with egg, dried out over low heat, then spread cold on toast and baked. The points below cover the measures, the oven, and the one step that decides whether it holds together.
- The hinge: reduce it, then chill it hardThe mixture must be cooked down by a third and then go quite cold before it is spread. Warm or wet mince slides off the toast and soaks it to pulp; properly reduced and chilled, it sets to a firm paste that can be spread like potted meat. An hour in the refrigerator does the work faster than the original's larder.
- A pintAn imperial pint, so 20 fl oz — about 2½ US cups of minced meat and gravy together. If your leftovers are drier than a stew, slacken them with a few spoonfuls of stock so the eggs have something to bind.
- Moderate oven350F/175C. A quarter of an hour at that heat crisps the crumbs and heats the toast through, which is all the recipe asks.
- Reheated meatThe stew is already cooked, but this is a second reheating of meat that has sat cold. Use leftovers no more than two or three days old, keep them refrigerated until they go into the pan, and make sure the mixture is steaming hot right through during the reduction rather than relying on the brief bake to do it.
- The raw onionA finely minced raw onion stirred into the mixture will still taste sharp after a short reduction. Sweating it in a little butter first gives a rounder result, and is closer to what the finished dish is aiming at.
- Egg wash and crumbsTwo eggs go into the mixture; you need a third, beaten, for brushing the top. Dry crumbs rather than fresh ones brown better in fifteen minutes.
- ToastCut it thick and toast it dry on both sides so it can carry a wet topping. Thin sliced bread collapses.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A pint of mince will cover roughly four to six rounds of toast, making a light supper for two or three or a savoury course for four.
This belongs to the large family of recipes for using cold meat, a category that occupies a great deal of space in Victorian household manuals. Fuel was expensive, joints were bought large, and refrigeration was a cool larder at best. The name is loose: "German toast" was applied in nineteenth-century English cookery books to more than one dish, sometimes to bread soaked in egg and fried (what would now be called French toast), sometimes, as here, to a savoury baked on toast. The finishing squeeze of lemon is doing real work, cutting the richness of egg-bound gravy.