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PORK, MINCED AS COLLOPS (a German recipe)
Mince one pound of cold lean pork and two ounces of fat pork very finely. Mix with it four ounces of grated bread-crumbs, and a little pepper and salt, and bind the mixture together with two well-beaten eggs. Form the mince into balls, flatten these on the top, brush them over with egg, dip them in bread-crumbs, and fry them in hot fat till they are lightly browned. Serve with good brown gravy. If liked, the collops instead of being fried may be stewed in a gravy prepared as follows. Put the bones and trimmings of the pork into a stewpan with as much stock as will cover them. Season the gravy with pepper and salt, and simmer it gently for half an hour. Strain it, place it again in the saucepan, and put in the collops. Let them stew for a quarter of an hour. Lift them out carefully, and keep them hot. Thicken the gravy with brown thickening, and add a table-spoonful of chopped capers or a couple of finely-minced shallots to the sauce. Send cauliflower or delicately-fried potatoes to table with the collops. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the cold meat. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A leftovers dish: cooked pork from a roast, minced, bound and either fried as patties or gently stewed in a stock made from the bones. Nothing here needs long cooking, since the meat is already done.
- "Collops"An old English word for a small flat slice or cutlet of meat. Here it means the shape only — flattened balls of mince, essentially small rissoles or croquettes, not slices cut from the joint.
- Cold lean porkLeftover roast pork or a boiled shoulder, trimmed of gristle. Raw pork mince will not behave the same way: it releases far more liquid and the mixture will be slack. If you use raw, treat it as a different recipe and cook the patties through to 160F.
- The fat porkTwo ounces of salt pork, fresh pork belly or fatback, finely chopped. This is what keeps twice-cooked lean meat from tasting dry, so do not leave it out; unsmoked bacon is the closest easy substitute.
- BreadcrumbsFour ounces of grated crumbs is about two cups of fresh soft crumbs from a stale loaf, not dry packaged crumbs, which absorb much more and will make the mixture crumbly. Keep a little extra dry crumb for the coating.
- FryingShallow-fry in fat hot enough to brown the coating briskly; around 350F is the usual modern equivalent, though the recipe says only 'hot fat'. 'Lightly browned' is the whole instruction — a few minutes a side should be enough to set the egg binding and heat the middle through.
- The stewed versionA quarter of an hour in simmering gravy suits already-cooked meat; keep the liquid at a bare tremble or the egg-bound patties will break up. Lift them with a slotted spoon before thickening the sauce.
- Brown thickeningA Victorian standby: flour cooked in fat to a nut-brown roux, kept in a jar and whisked into gravies. A tablespoon each of butter and flour worked to a paste and stirred in off the boil does the same job.
- Yield and costThree or four servings, and "probable cost, 6d." reflects only the eggs, crumbs and fat — the point of the dish is that the meat was already paid for.
Cassell's flags this as German, and the kinship is visible: minced cooked meat bound with egg and grated bread, shaped and browned, is the family to which Frikadellen and Buletten and the various regional rissoles of northern Germany belong, where such patties were often a way of using yesterday's roast as much as a dish in their own right. The capers and shallot finish sits comfortably in the same north-German and Anglo-French repertoire that put capers into sauce for boiled mutton. Its place in a book of household cookery is straightforwardly economic: a family roast was bought large, and a dictionary of cookery was expected to say what to do with the cold remains later in the week. Recipes of this type — labelled by nation, adapted to English stock and gravy conventions — are common in late-nineteenth-century compendia, as the middle-class table acquired an appetite for foreign names attached to familiar techniques.