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Ragouts, Gravy for All Kinds Of
Take two slices of ham and two pounds of lean veal from the fillet. Cut the meat into six or eight pieces, and put these in a stewpan with half a pint of water. Bring the liquor slowly to the boil, and simmer very gently for half an hour, when it will have nearly boiled away. Turn the meat, put into the saucepan with it an onion stuck with two cloves, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, half a blade of mace, a carrot cut into two or three pieces, three of four outer sticks of celery (or half a tea-spoonful of celery-seed tied in muslin), a little pepper and salt, and three pints of boiling water. Bring the liquor to the boil, draw the saucepan to the side, and simmer all very gently without the lid for two hours. Strain the liquor, and put it aside for use. The pieces of meat may be potted and serve as a relish for breakfast or luncheon, or they may be served with a piquant sauce. Sufficient for a quart of gravy. Probable cost, 3s. Time, two hours and a half.
This is a veal-and-ham stock reduced in two stages, the base for the ragouts and made sauces elsewhere in the book. Nothing here is dangerous; the only real skill is judging the first reduction.
- The hinge: the first reductionThe half pint of water is not there to cook the meat but to draw out juices that then reduce to a sticky brown film on the pan bottom. Let it go almost dry and colour lightly before you turn the meat and add the rest of the liquid; that glaze is where the flavour and colour of the finished gravy come from. Take it too far and it scorches, and the gravy turns bitter.
- Imperial measuresA British pint is 20 fl oz, so the half pint is about 1 1/4 US cups and the three pints of boiling water about 7 1/2 US cups. The stated yield of a quart is likewise about 40 fl oz, five US cups.
- Veal from the filletFillet here means the leg, not the tenderloin. Ask for veal leg or top round, cut into large chunks; shin or a piece with some connective tissue will give a better-bodied stock still.
- The two slices of hamThick, dry-cured raw ham such as a gammon or prosciutto end, not sandwich ham. Cut them thick, half an inch or so, and taste for salt before you add any at all.
- Blade of maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg, sold either as whole blades or ground. Half a blade is roughly 1/8 teaspoon of ground mace; use less rather than more, as it dominates quickly.
- Lid off, and barely simmeringCooking uncovered lets the liquid concentrate to the stated quart and keeps the surface from churning, which is what makes a stock cloudy. Hold it at a bare tremble, skimming the grey scum in the first ten minutes.
- Season at the endThe recipe salts early, but the liquid is reduced by roughly a third over the two hours and the ham adds salt of its own. Season the strained gravy, not the pot.
- The leftover meatBoiled-out veal and ham has given most of its flavour to the liquid. Potting it, the book's suggestion, means pounding it with butter and spices and sealing it under a layer of clarified butter; keep potted meat refrigerated and eat within a few days rather than trusting the butter seal as the Victorians did.
- Yield and keepingAbout five cups. Chilled, it should set to a light jelly; lift off the fat cap before use. Three or four days refrigerated, several months frozen.
Cassell's calls this simply "gravy," but in nineteenth-century usage that word covered what a modern kitchen calls brown stock: a neutral, well-bodied liquid held in reserve to be turned into whatever sauce the day's dishes wanted. Veal was the standard body-giving meat for it, prized less for taste than for the gelatine in a young animal's connective tissue, with ham supplying savour and a little salt; the trick of reducing a small quantity of water to a glaze before adding the bulk of the liquid is the same principle as the French fond brun, and is generally traced to the professional kitchens whose methods filtered into English household manuals through the century. The costing of three shillings is a reminder of what such cookery assumed: two pounds of veal and two slices of ham spent on liquid alone, with the meat itself demoted to a breakfast relish. That was reasonable in a house with a cook and a coal range kept going all day, and it is often suggested that such expectations had much to do with recipes like this one dropping out of domestic books once the stock cube arrived.