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Veal Beignets
Cut some slices, about two inches square, from cold veal; season well with pepper and salt, and dip the pieces into batter; fry for two or three minutes in plenty of boiling fat to a golden brown. Have ready a hot dish with baked potatoes arranged neatly round, lay the beignets in the centre, and serve immediately.
A leftover-meat fritter, and one of the more useful ways Victorian kitchens used up a cold joint. The whole dish stands or falls on the batter clinging and the fat being hot enough.
- "Beignet" here means fritterNot the sugared New Orleans doughnut. In nineteenth-century English cookery books a beignet is anything dipped in batter and deep-fried, savoury or sweet.
- BatterThe recipe gives no batter, assuming the reader already has a frying batter to hand. A typical coating batter of the period runs to roughly 4 oz (about 1 cup) flour, a pinch of salt, an egg and enough milk or water to make a coating the thickness of heavy cream. Resting it about 30 minutes helps it cling rather than slide off.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" means fat at frying heat, not literally boiling — 350–375F. Below that the batter drinks oil and the veal steams; the two or three minutes given assumes the meat is already cooked and only the coating needs colour.
- Dry the meat firstCold roast veal carries surface moisture and often a film of set gravy. Blot the squares thoroughly and dust them with seasoned flour before the batter, or the coating will slip in the pan.
- Cut thicknessTwo inches square is given but no thickness; about a quarter to a third of an inch works. Thicker pieces will not heat through in the time allowed.
- Baked potatoesThe border was most likely small whole potatoes baked in their skins, arranged as a ring. Modern roast potato halves do the same job and look less severe.
- YieldA pound of cold veal gives roughly 16 squares, enough for four as a light main course or six as a starter. Fry in batches and hold on a rack in a 250F oven — draining on paper in a pile softens the crust.
- Veal substitutionCold roast pork, turkey or chicken behave identically here, and are easier to buy. Any leftover meat should be no more than three or four days old and thoroughly reheated in the frying.
This looks like one of the economy dishes: a Victorian household roasted large joints and expected the cook to have a repertoire of second-day treatments, of which battering and frying was the quickest and the most flattering. Veal was a common enough town meat in Britain through the nineteenth century, when the calf trade fed urban butchers, and cold veal in particular had a reputation for blandness that a crisp fried coating and sharp seasoning were meant to remedy \well well. The French name is doing the same work it does throughout Cassell's, lending a reheated remnant the dignity of a restaurant dish, a habit of English cookery writing that runs from Francatelli through to the Edwardian household manuals.