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Veal Cakes, Small
Mince, season, and mix the veal and bacon as in the last recipe. Divide the mixture into small cakes. Dredge these all over with flour, and fry in hot fat over a gentle fire. Drain them well, and serve in a hot dish with brown sauce, made from the trimmings of the veal and thickened, poured over them. Time to fry the cakes, about a quarter of an hour.
A fried minced-veal patty of the kind Victorian kitchens made from the trimmings of a larger joint. The original leans on the preceding recipe for its proportions, so a little reconstruction is needed.
- The missing proportions"As in the last recipe" means minced veal with a smaller quantity of bacon, seasoned at least with salt and pepper; the exact seasoning cannot be recovered from this page. A workable ratio is 3 parts lean veal to 1 part fat bacon by weight; the bacon is there for fat and salt, since veal is very lean.
- Bind the mixtureNothing in the text binds the cakes. A beaten egg or a spoonful of soaked breadcrumbs per pound makes them far less likely to break when turned.
- "A gentle fire"Medium-low heat, not a searing pan. The point is to cook minced meat through without the flour coating burning.
- The frying timeA quarter of an hour is right only for thick cakes on genuinely low heat. Small patties three-quarters of an inch thick are done in eight to ten minutes turned once; cook to 160F internal, as with any minced meat, and no further, or veal goes dry and grainy.
- Brown sauce from the trimmingsThis assumes a stockpot already going. Brown the veal bones and scraps hard, deglaze, simmer with onion and a bay leaf, then thicken with a brown roux. A good jarred demi-glace or reduced veal stock thickened with beurre manié does the same job.
- DrainingDrain on paper, not in the pan, and sauce them only at the table. Flour-dredged cakes sitting in gravy go soft within minutes.
- YieldA pound of mixture makes six to eight small cakes, serving three or four with the sauce and a vegetable.
Cassell's places this among a run of veal recipes built on economy: a leg or shoulder of veal was broken down for cutlets and roasts, and the scrag, trimmings and bones went to mince, forcemeat and stock. Fried minced cakes of this sort might be read as sitting between the older English forcemeat ball and the continental croquette, and appear in nineteenth-century British books under names like veal cakes and veal rissoles. The near-obligatory addition of bacon reflects a real constraint rather than taste alone, and minced veal is often said to have called for pork fat, suet or bacon to keep it from drying in the pan. That the sauce is made from the same animal's trimmings is characteristic of the book's whole approach to a large joint: nothing leaves the kitchen unused.