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Veal, Cold, Minced with Mushrooms or Oysters
Take a pound of cold cooked veal, and trim away the gristle and the brown edges. A little fat may be added or not; this is a matter of taste. Mince the meat finely, season with salt, cayenne, and pounded mace, and heat it--without letting it reach the point of boiling--in a pint of rich sauce. Stir into the sauce at the moment of serving half a pint of mushrooms stewed till tender with a slice of butter and minced. Turn the preparation on a dish, and garnish with fried sippets. If liked, a dozen or more oysters may be used instead of the mushrooms. They should be bearded and put into the mince a quarter of a minute before it is taken from the fire. The oyster broth should, of course, be added. Time, till thoroughly hot. The mince should be very slowly heated.
A Victorian way of using up the Sunday joint, and one that stands or falls on temperature control. The instructions are complete but assume a cook who knows what "rich sauce" and "sippets" mean.
- Never let it boilThis is the hinge. Cold roast veal that is boiled a second time turns dry and stringy, and an egg- or cream-enriched sauce will separate. Keep the pan at a bare steam over low heat, stirring, and take it off as soon as it is hot through.
- But do get it properly hot"till thoroughly hot" is all the recipe specifies. Modern practice for reheated cooked meat is for the centre of the mixture to reach 165F/74C, which is still well below simmering, so the two instructions do not conflict.
- A pint of rich sauceImperial measure: 20 fl oz, about 2.5 US cups. That is a great deal of sauce to a pound of meat, and deliberately so, the dish should be spoonable rather than stiff. "Rich sauce" here means a velouté or béchamel made with good veal or chicken stock and finished with cream, or the reduced gravy from the original roast.
- Half a pint of mushroomsMeasured by volume; half an imperial pint is 10 fl oz, about 1.25 US cups. Stew them in butter until they have given up their liquid and it has cooked away, otherwise they will thin the sauce.
- Pounded maceBlade mace crushed in a mortar, not nutmeg, though nutmeg is the nearest substitute. A quarter teaspoon of ground mace is ample for a pound of meat; it was the standard warm spice for pale meats and forcemeats in English cookery.
- Bearding oystersTrimming off the dark frilled gill. Modern shucked oysters are usually sold whole and the beard is edible, so this is optional. The "quarter of a minute" is not an exaggeration, oysters firm up almost instantly in a hot sauce and go rubbery within a minute.
- Oyster brothThe liquor in the shell, strained through muslin to catch grit. Add it to the sauce a few minutes earlier so it can warm through and season the whole dish rather than cooling it at the last moment.
- Fried sippetsTriangles of crustless bread fried in butter or clarified fat until crisp, arranged point-up round the edge of the dish. They exist to give the soft mince something to be eaten against, so fry them at the last minute.
- YieldA pound of meat in this quantity of sauce serves three as a main course with potatoes, or four as a lunch dish.
Minced or "hashed" veal belongs to the large Victorian literature of second-day cookery, in which a cold joint was expected to reappear at least twice and the cook's skill was judged by how little it looked like leftovers. It demonstrates a rule that recurs throughout such books: already-cooked meat is warmed in sauce, never re-boiled in it. Veal suited the treatment particularly well, being mild, pale and inclined to dryness, which is why it is so often paired with cream sauces, mace and forcemeat in nineteenth-century English kitchens. The alternative of oysters is a survival from an older habit, oysters were cheap and plentiful in Britain through most of the century and were used as a savoury addition to meat dishes far more freely than their present price would allow; the decline of the native beds in the later 1800s is often said to have ended the practice, though the causes are debated.