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VEAL, BLANQUETTE OF, WITH MUSHROOMS (another way)
Take from one to two pounds of cold cooked veal, and mince it finely. Chop an onion, and fry it in butter till it begins to turn yellow. Stir in with it a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, and beat it with a spoonful of flour to a smooth paste. Moisten this with stock to make it of the consistency of cream, and add a table-spoonful of chopped mushrooms and a little pepper and salt. Simmer the sauce for about ten minutes, add the mince, simmer the sauce again until the meat is heated throughout, but it must not boil, or the veal will harden. If liked, the well-beaten yolks of two eggs and the strained juice of half a lemon may be added to the sauce. Time, altogether, about an hour. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A frugal reheating dish rather than a true blanquette, this uses cold roast or boiled veal in a velouté-style sauce. The whole thing hinges on temperature control.
- Never let it boilOnce the meat goes in, hold the pan at a bare shiver, around 170-180F. Cooked veal is already set protein; boiling squeezes it further and turns the mince grainy and tough, exactly as the original warns.
- The egg liaisonIf you use the yolks and lemon, pull the pan off the heat first, whisk a ladle of hot sauce into the beaten yolks, then stir that back in. Returned to direct heat it will scramble; warm it gently and stop as soon as it thickens.
- Add lemon lastAcid added to a hot dairy-free velouté is fine, but with yolks in it encourages curdling. Stir the strained juice in at the very end, off the heat.
- QuantitiesA "spoonful" of flour here probably means a tablespoon; the butter is not specified. That much flour will thicken roughly half a pint of stock to cream consistency. A tablespoon of chopped mushrooms is modest, and more may be used if a stronger flavour is wanted, though the original adds them to the sauce rather than with the onion.
- StockVeal or light chicken stock, unsalted or lightly salted, since the sauce reduces. A dark beef stock will overwhelm the veal.
- "Time, altogether, about an hour"The hour presumably allows for mincing the cold meat by hand. With the veal already chopped, the cooking is roughly twenty minutes: ten for the sauce, five to ten to heat the meat through.
- MincingHand-chop rather than using a food processor, which will paste cooked veal. The original calls for the meat minced finely.
- ServingThree or four as written. Minces of this kind were often sent to table with a border of mashed potato, boiled rice, or triangles of fried bread, though the recipe itself says nothing about serving.
A blanquette proper is veal simmered from raw in a white stock and finished with a liaison of egg yolk and cream, a French ragout defined by the fact that nothing in it is browned. What Cassell's gives here appears to be an English household adaptation: the same pale sauce and yolk-and-lemon finish applied to yesterday's cold joint, which fits the instruction that the onion be taken only to yellow rather than brown. Late Victorian cookery books devote a great deal of space to these re-dressed meats; the skill being taught is not how to cook veal but how to reheat it without ruining it. The insistence that the sauce must not boil is the whole lesson of the entry.