Home › The Principles of Cookery › Meat Cake, Moulded
Meat Cake, Moulded
Pounded or potted meat does best for this cake. Cut slices of cold roast veal, without any of the brown part, and lean ham; pound them to a paste in a mortar. Boil eight or ten eggs hard, and mince parsley enough to half fill a quarter-pint cup, season with a little pounded mace and pepper. Lay the egg-yolks, in halves, at the bottom of a buttered mould, and strew some of the parsley over them. Next, make a layer of the pounded meat, which should be moistened with a little good stock or gravy; arrange the egg-yolks as before, and fill up with seasoning and meat. Put bits of butter over the top, and bake in a gentle oven. The cake should not be removed from the mould until cold. Time, about three-quarters of an hour to bake. Sufficient, two pounds of meat for four persons.
A Victorian potted-meat loaf set in a mould, closer to a terrine or a pressed galantine than anything a modern cook would call cake. The hinge is the cooling: it must set fully in the mould or it will collapse when turned out.
- Gentle oven"Gentle" is generally taken to mean a low to moderate heat, somewhere around 300-325F, though the book itself gives no figure. The mixture is already cooked through, so the bake is only to set it and marry the seasoning; three-quarters of an hour at that heat suits a mould holding two pounds of meat.
- A quarter-pint cupA quarter of an imperial pint is 5 fluid ounces. Half-filling it means about 2½ fluid ounces of minced parsley, loosely packed, roughly five tablespoons, which is less than it sounds once distributed through two pounds of meat.
- Pounding without a mortarA food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar did in fifteen minutes. Pulse the veal and ham separately to a coarse paste rather than running it smooth, or the texture turns pasty and gluey.
- Why no brown partThe recipe does not say why the outer roasted crust is excluded, but colour is the likely reason: the finished cake is meant to be pale, so the halved yellow yolks and green parsley read as a pattern when sliced.
- The leftover whitesThe recipe uses only the yolks of eight to ten hard-boiled eggs and says nothing about the whites. Chop them into the meat layers if you want them used, or keep them back for a salad.
- Moistening the meat"A little good stock or gravy" means enough to make the paste spreadable, a few tablespoons at most. A jellied stock is better than a thin one, since it firms as the cake cools and helps it hold together.
- UnmouldingDo not rush this. Chill the mould thoroughly, several hours or overnight, then dip the base briefly in hot water and turn out. Warm, the cake will break along the layers.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of meat for four is generous by modern appetites and will serve six to eight as a cold first course or lunch dish, sliced thin, with pickles, mustard or a sharp salad.
- KeepingThere is no cure or seal here, only cooked meat and butter. Treat it as any cooked leftover: refrigerated, covered, and eaten within three days.
Moulded meat cakes of this kind belong to the long English tradition of potted meats, which began as a way of preserving cooked flesh under a seal of clarified butter and survived into the nineteenth century as a way of using up a roast. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s, cold veal and ham pounded together were such a standard pairing that they had their own name, veal and ham cake or veal cake, and the halved yolks laid in the bottom of the mould are the same decorative trick that gives a raised pie or a galantine its pattern in cross-section. The dish tells you something about a household that roasted large joints and expected the remains to reappear at supper or on the cold table, dressed up enough to look deliberate rather than thrifty. The word "cake" here simply means a shaped, moulded mass, an older sense of the word that also survives in fish cake and oatcake.