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Veal and Rice Cakes
Take some cold boiled rice (as for curry), add to it half its weight of cold veal, and the same of cold bacon, first finely minced and then pounded. Pound all together with a little salt, pepper, grated lemon-peel, nutmeg, thyme, and parsley. Add the yolk of an egg, and form into small cakes or balls. Coat with white of egg and crushed vermicelli, or bread-crumbs, and fry brown. Send a piquant brown sauce or a gravy made from veal bones flavoured with mushroom ketchup to table with them. Probable cost, 1s. per dozen.
A Victorian way of using up cold roast veal and boiled rice, closer to a croquette than a cake. The proportions are given by weight, which makes them easy to scale.
- The ratioTwo parts cooked rice to one part veal and one part bacon by weight. A practical batch is 8 oz cooked rice, 4 oz veal, 4 oz bacon, which gives roughly a dozen small cakes.
- "Rice as for curry"This means plain boiled long-grain rice cooked until the grains are separate and dry, not creamy or sticky. Rice cooked soft will make a paste that will not hold its shape in the pan.
- PoundingThe original assumes a mortar. A food processor does the same work in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, or the rice turns to glue. The mixture should hold together while still showing texture.
- The bacon"Cold bacon" here is most likely meat left from a boiled or baked joint, of the sort we would now call gammon or a thick cured ham, though the recipe does not specify. Cooked thick-cut streaky bacon works, but reduce the added salt accordingly.
- Crushed vermicelliDry vermicelli or fine egg noodles broken into short splinters, used as a coating for crunch and appearance. Panko gives a similar effect with less risk of the coating scorching before the cake heats through.
- FryingShallow-fry in about half an inch of fat at 350F, two to three minutes a side. Everything inside is already cooked, so you are only browning the crust and heating the centre; chilling the shaped cakes for half an hour first stops them breaking up.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, not a tomato sauce. Still sold by some British makers; a spoonful of soy sauce plus a little Worcestershire in the gravy gives a comparable savoury depth.
- ServingA dozen small cakes serve four as a light dish with the sauce and a green salad, or six as a first course.
Cassell's dictionary belongs to a genre of late nineteenth-century British household books preoccupied with the honourable use of leftovers: cold joints, cold rice and cold bacon all had a designated second life, and such made-over dishes take up a substantial part of the book. The formula here — minced cold meat bound with a starch, seasoned with lemon peel and nutmeg, egged, crumbed and fried — is the standard Victorian croquette, applied to whatever the larder held. Lemon peel and nutmeg were a conventional English seasoning for veal in this period, appearing in forcemeats and veal pies much as sage went with pork. The costing of "1s. per dozen" is characteristic of the book, which gives a probable cost for a great many of its dishes, so that a household could weigh a dish against the housekeeping money.