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Turkey, Minced
When a turkey has been so far used that neat slices cannot be cut from it to make a hash, the remains may be dressed as follows. Cut off the meat, free it from skin, bone, and sinew, and mince it finely. Season with salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg, and put it into a stewpan with sufficient white sauce to moisten it. Let it simmer gently without boiling till it is quite hot, stirring all the time. Turn it upon a hot dish, and garnish with poached eggs and toasted sippets placed alternately. When the white sauce is not at hand, a little may be made as follows. Put a quarter of a pint of stock into a saucepan with a thin strip of lemon-rind. Let it simmer gently a few minutes till it is pleasantly flavoured with the lemon. Strain, and add gradually a dessert-spoonful of flour which has been smoothly mixed with three or four table-spoonfuls of milk or cream. Stir the sauce gently over the fire for a few minutes till it is quite thick, and add pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, if required, and after it is taken from the fire stir half an ounce of fresh butter into it until dissolved. Time, a few minutes to heat the mince.
A leftovers dish from the tail end of a roast turkey, built on a small quantity of quick white sauce. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat: the mince is already cooked, and boiling only tightens the fibres and curdles the sauce.
- The hinge: heat, do not cookSimmer gently without boiling until hot through, stirring constantly. Reheated cooked poultry toughens fast, and a flour-and-milk sauce with butter beaten in will split if it is pushed to a rolling boil.
- Imperial measuresA quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. A dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons; half an ounce of butter is roughly one tablespoon.
- StewpanA stewpan is simply a wide, straight-sided saucepan. Any small heavy-based pan works; the wide base helps the mince heat evenly without scorching.
- SippetsSippets are small triangles or fingers of toasted or fried bread, cut from a crustless slice. Toast them shortly before serving so they stay crisp against the wet mince.
- QuantitiesThe original gives no weight of meat and no yield. The sauce as written, about 5 fl oz of stock plus 3-4 tablespoons of milk, is a small quantity: as a rough guide it would moisten something like 12 oz to 1 lb of minced turkey, but the instruction is simply to use "sufficient white sauce to moisten it."
- The lemon-rind infusionUse a strip of peel with as little white pith as possible. The recipe asks for only a few minutes' simmering, which is enough to flavour the stock; a long infusion risks a harsh rather than fragrant result.
- ThickeningBecause the flour is slaked in cold milk and stirred into hot stock rather than cooked in butter first, the sauce needs a few minutes of gentle stirring to lose its raw-flour taste. The butter goes in off the heat, as directed, for gloss.
- Reheating leftoversUse turkey that has been properly refrigerated and is no more than three or four days old, and bring the mince right through to steaming hot rather than merely warm.
- Poached eggsPoach them while the mince heats and drain them well on a cloth; carried straight from the water they will thin the sauce.
Cassell's is a household dictionary rather than a book of set pieces, and this entry sits in a long series of instructions for using up a large roast bird in descending order of dignity: first neat carved slices, then a hash of smaller pieces, and finally the scraps too ragged to carve, minced and bound in sauce. Turkey was a Christmas and celebration roast in Victorian Britain, large enough to feed a household for several days. The dressing here, minced meat under poached eggs with alternating sippets around the dish, is a standard late-nineteenth-century way of making remnants look composed on the table, and similar treatments are often said to have been used for other meats. The white sauce, thickened with flour slaked in milk rather than a cooked roux, is the quick domestic version of a velouté.