Home › The Principles of Cookery › Veal, Blanquette of, Made from Cold Cooked Meat
Veal, Blanquette of, Made from Cold Cooked Meat
Take from two to three pounds of cold cooked veal. Cut it into neat slices, and trim away the brown outside. Put these slices into a dish, cover them over, and keep them in a cool place till wanted. Mince the brown part, and put it into a saucepan with a good-sized onion chopped small, a stick of celery, a bunch of parsley, a little pepper and salt, and a pint of stock made from bones. Let all simmer gently together for half an hour. Strain the gravy, and put it again into the saucepan with a pinch of pounded mace, the strained juice of half a lemon, and the slices of veal. Let the liquor simmer a minute or two. Beat the yolks of two eggs in a bowl. Mix a small quantity of the warm gravy with them, and add this liquor gradually to the rest of the broth. Stir the sauce till it is smooth and thick, but it must not boil or it will curdle. This dish is excellent with green peas as an accompaniment. Time, altogether, about an hour. Probable cost, exclusive of the cold meat, 6d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A leftovers dish dressed up as a classic French blanquette: the sauce is thickened with egg yolk alone, so the whole thing hinges on heat control.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the yolks go in, keep the pan below a simmer — roughly 180F/82C is the ceiling. Above that the yolks scramble and the sauce breaks into grains that no amount of whisking will bring back. Tempering with a ladle of hot gravy first, as written, is essential, not optional.
- A pint of stockAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, or about 570 ml — a little under 2½ US cups. Use unsalted or lightly salted bone stock; the reduction plus the seasoning of the original meat can push it salty.
- Pounded maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold now as blades or ready-ground. A pinch of ground mace is right; if you only have blades, grind them or infuse one in the stock during the half-hour simmer and fish it out.
- Reheating cooked vealThe slices go into hot liquid only for a minute or two, which is enough to warm them through without toughening. Bring the cold veal fully to serving heat — steaming, not tepid — before the yolks go in, since you cannot raise the temperature much afterwards.
- Sourcing the meatThis assumes a leftover roast or boiled joint. Any mild cooked meat works the same way: a poached chicken or turkey breast gives a similar result, though only a roast joint supplies the browned trimmings the recipe uses for its flavour base.
- The brown trimmingsThe point of mincing the outside and simmering it is to extract roast flavour into the stock, then strain it out. Do not skip it and do not leave the shreds in — the finished blanquette should be pale and smooth.
- ConsistencyTwo yolks in a pint of stock gives a thin, pouring sauce, closer to a velvety broth than a coating. If you want it thicker, reduce the strained gravy by a third before the yolks go in rather than adding more egg.
- Yield and servingFive or six portions as written, though it is generous for four as a main course. Green peas are the period accompaniment; plain rice or boiled potatoes catch the sauce better.
Blanquette comes from the French blanc, white — the defining feature of the dish is that nothing is browned, and the sauce is finished with a liaison of egg yolk rather than a roux coloured in the pan. A true blanquette de veau starts from raw veal blanched and poached in its own broth; what Cassell's gives here is the household economy version, a way of turning a cold joint into a second dinner with company manners. The note of "probable cost, exclusive of the cold meat, 6d" is the giveaway: this is a recipe sold on thrift, from a period when cold joints were commonly re-dressed over following days. The trick of mincing the browned outside to flavour a stock, then straining it away so the finished dish stays pale, is the kind of small professional discipline these Victorian compendia set out to pass on.