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Veal, Cold, Baked
Take a quarter of a pound of cold roast veal free from skin and gristle. Mince it finely, and with it two or three slices of bacon. Add the bulk of the mince in finely-grated bread-crumbs, together with a little salt and cayenne, a quarter of a tea-spoonful of minced lemon-rind, and a pinch of pounded mace. Mix these ingredients thoroughly, stir them into a cupful of veal gravy, add two well-beaten eggs, and pour the whole into a small buttered dish. Bake in a well-heated oven, and serve with gravy in a tureen. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, exclusive of the cold meat, 4d. Sufficient for two persons.
A Victorian way of turning Sunday's leftover roast into a second hot dish: a savoury custard-bound mince, closer to a baked pudding than a loaf. The proportions are given by bulk rather than weight, so read them as ratios.
- Scale and yieldA quarter pound (about 115 g) of cooked veal, an equal volume of breadcrumbs, a cup of gravy and two eggs feeds two as a light main course. It doubles cleanly in a larger dish, but add five to ten minutes to the baking.
- "A well-heated oven"The book gives no temperatures; a modern equivalent is usually taken as somewhere in the region of 375-400F (190-200C), and at the lower end an egg-bound mixture is safer. Half an hour should set it: the centre should be just firm and no longer wobbling.
- The hinge: the gravy must be coolStir the eggs into gravy that is warm at most, never hot, or they will scramble in the bowl and the baked mixture will weep. Mix the meat, crumbs and seasoning into the gravy first, then beat the eggs in last.
- Veal, and what to use insteadCold roast veal is scarce and expensive in most places now. Leftover roast pork loin or turkey breast behaves the same way — mild, close-grained meat that carries the mace and lemon.
- The bacon is the fatTwo or three slices of bacon, minced with the veal, supply the richness the cold roast has lost. Bacon is salty, so hold back on the added salt until you have tasted the mixture.
- Breadcrumbs"Finely-grated bread-crumbs" means dry crumbs from stale bread, not the soft fresh sort and not commercial panko. Dry crumbs absorb the gravy and give the pudding its body; fresh crumbs make it pasty.
- Mace and lemon-rindPounded mace is the outer covering of nutmeg, milder and more floral — about an eighth of a teaspoon of ground mace here. Zest the lemon and chop the zest finely rather than grating a whole strip of pith in with it.
- ServingThe gravy in a tureen is not optional decoration; the baked mixture is fairly dense and wants a spoonful of hot gravy over each portion. The cupful in the recipe goes entirely into the mixture, so the tureen gravy has to be extra.
Recipes like this belong to the Victorian economy of the cold joint. A large roast was served hot once, cold in slices the next day, and then rescued a third time as a mince, hash, croquette or baked pudding — the style is generally traced to Cassell's, which devotes pages to such re-dressings, each with its "probable cost", often said to have let a mistress check her cook's housekeeping. The 4d. quoted here is for the crumbs, bacon, eggs and seasoning only; the meat is treated as already paid for, which is precisely the point. Veal was the ideal candidate: mild enough to take mace, cayenne and lemon-rind without argument, and gelatinous enough that its gravy set well with egg. The technique — mince bound with crumbs and egg, baked in a buttered dish — distantly anticipates the meat loaf of later American cookery, though that is built from raw minced meat rather than cooked leftovers.