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Milanese Ragout
This ragout is used for garnishing purposes. Tongue, ham, chicken, game, with truffles, mushrooms, and macaroni are cooked and cut off as nearly of a uniform size as the different ingredients will permit, about an inch in length and a quarter of an inch broad. They are warmed up in white sauce with a mixture of grated Parmesan, and seasoned slightly with nutmeg and pepper.
Cassell's gives a formula rather than a recipe: proportions are left to the cook because the ragout exists to fill something else. A few decisions have to be made before you start.
- Everything goes in cookedThis is a made dish assembled from leftovers and trimmings — boiled tongue, baked ham, poached chicken, roast game. Nothing is cooked from raw in the sauce; the meats are only brought back to serving heat, three or four minutes, or they turn dry and stringy.
- Proportions to work fromThe recipe itself gives none. For about 5 cups of finished ragout, use roughly 2 cups of mixed meats, 1 cup of cooked macaroni, and 1 cup of mushrooms and truffle between them, bound with 1 to 1 1/4 cups of white sauce. The sauce should coat, not pool.
- White sauce means veloutéWhite sauce -- In a book of this period the "white sauce" for a meat ragout may well be a blond roux moistened with veal or chicken stock rather than milk, though English white sauces of the date were made both ways and the entry does not say which. A b u00e9chamel will work but tastes flatter against tongue and game.
- Parmesan off the heatStir the grated cheese in once the pan is off the burner. Held at a simmer it separates and the sauce goes grainy — the single point where this dish fails.
- Macaroni in 1900Macaroni of the period -- The macaroni of the period was long tubular pasta, cut down to matchsticks to match the meat. Modern short-cut elbows will not give the batons the recipe asks for; use a length of bucatini or ziti and cut it into inch pieces.
- TrufflesFresh black truffle is optional at any sane price. A small jar of preserved truffle peelings, or a good pinch of dried porcini soaked and chopped, keeps the earthy note the mixture is built around.
- Cutting to sizeAn inch by a quarter inch is not fussiness: uniform batons let a spoonful of the ragout sit neatly in a pastry case and reheat at the same rate. Cut the meats cold, straight from the refrigerator.
- How it was servedAs a garnish it fills vol-au-vent and patty cases, tops a rice or semolina border, or is spooned around a roast. The quantity above will fill roughly eight small pastry cases, or dress a dish for six.
In nineteenth-century professional cookery a dish called u00e0 la Milanaise generally signalled two things: macaroni and Parmesan, and the label attached itself to garnishes, timbales and cutlet coatings that used them, whatever their actual relation to Lombardy. This entry is a component rather than a finished dish, one of the standard named ragouts a cook was expected to be able to produce on demand to fill a vol-au-vent or ring a joint. It also shows the economy of a large late-Victorian kitchen: cold tongue, the last of the ham, a leg off yesterday's pheasant, all diced to the same size, bound in sauce, and returned to the table looking deliberate.