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Meat Balls, Minced, Fried
Take some roast mutton, some chestnuts, and neck of veal boiled in water with salt and vinegar. Cut them up separately into small pieces, mix them with seasoning herbs, also cut as fine as possible. Add enough salt and pepper to season the materials, and make them into a mass with the yolks of three eggs. Roll this into balls, fry in butter until done, and then serve with tomato sauce.
A thrift recipe with no quantities at all, built to use up cold roast mutton. The proportions are yours to set, but the balance of meat to binder is what decides whether these hold together.
- Work out your own proportionsNothing is measured except the three egg yolks, which will bind roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb of chopped mixture. Aim for about two parts cooked mutton to one part veal, with 6-8 chestnuts for the whole batch.
- The chestnuts need cooking firstThe recipe assumes you already have them roasted or boiled and peeled. Raw chestnuts will stay hard and starchy through frying. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts work directly.
- Neck of vealA bony, gelatinous cut sold now as veal neck or, more often, not sold at all. Boneless veal shoulder simmered in salted water with a splash of vinegar for about an hour gives the same soft, mild meat; vinegar in such a boiling was generally held to keep veal pale, though the recipe gives no reason for it.
- Chop, do not process"Cut them up separately into small pieces" means knife-minced to a coarse, uneven texture. A food processor turns cooked mutton to paste and the balls become dense and rubbery.
- Seasoning herbsThe recipe does not specify them. Parsley with thyme and marjoram is the usual reading for a savoury forcemeat of this kind; a tablespoon of chopped parsley to a teaspoon each of the woody herbs is a reasonable starting point.
- Yolks only, and rest the mixtureYolks bind without the toughening that whites bring. Chill the mass for 20-30 minutes before rolling or the balls will slump in the pan.
- FryingButter alone browns and burns fast; use clarified butter, or butter with a little neutral oil, over medium heat. The meat is already cooked, so 5-6 minutes turning to colour all sides is enough -- longer only dries them.
- Yield and servingAbout 18-20 walnut-sized balls, serving four as a main course with the tomato sauce and potatoes, or six as a first course.
This is a made-over dish -- one of several Victorian terms, alongside rechauffe, cold meat cookery and made dish, for a recipe whose whole purpose is the remains of an earlier meal. Cassell's, like Mrs Beeton before it, devoted long stretches to cold roast joints, since a household that roasted a leg of mutton on Sunday faced it again on Monday and Tuesday, and open-ended "take some" phrasing is the signature of that genre: the cook has whatever the sideboard left. The chestnuts date the dish to autumn and winter, when they were sold roasted on London streets and used far more freely in savoury cooking than they are now, as a sweet starchy extender in forcemeats and stuffings. Tomato sauce alongside is a reminder of how readily Cassell's reaches for it to brighten reheated meat.