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Veal Collops, Made with Cooked Veal
Take the remains of roast veal. Cut the meat into slices three-quarters of an inch thick, three inches long, and two inches across. Gash these with a sharp knife, and sprinkle upon them salt and cayenne, pounded mace, or grated nutmeg. Cover them, and lay them aside till wanted. Break up the bones, and put them with the skin and trimmings of the meat into a saucepan. Cover with stock or water, and add an onion, a pinch of powdered mace, a few peppercorns, a small roll of lemon-rind, and a little salt. Let the gravy simmer till it is strong and pleasantly flavoured. Thicken it, and, supposing there is half a pint of it, stir into it a few drops of strained lemon-juice, a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, and two table-spoonfuls of sherry. Flour and fry the collops in hot fat, put them in a dish, the sauce over them, and serve. Fried rashers of bacon should accompany this dish. If liked, a few forcemeat-balls may be interspersed with the meat in the dish, and three table-spoonfuls of thick cream, or two table-spoonfuls of milk beaten up with the yolk of an egg, may be stirred into the sauce. Time to fry the collops, about six minutes; one hour to make the gravy.
A Victorian way of making a second dinner out of a cold roast joint: the meat is fried briefly, the bones do the real work in a stockpot alongside. The hinge is that the veal is already cooked, so the frying is for colour only.
- Do not cook the veal twiceThe book allows about six minutes in hot fat, and no more is wanted. Cooked veal is lean and dries to cotton; fry until the flour coating is golden on both sides and stop.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 cups. The seasonings for the sauce are pegged to that volume, so scale the lemon juice, ketchup and sherry if your gravy reduces further.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, not tomato ketchup. Bottled versions still exist; a teaspoon of soy sauce plus a little Worcestershire gives a comparable savoury depth if you have none.
- Pounded maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than the nut itself. Ground mace from a jar is fine; "pounded" simply means it was done in a mortar.
- Thickening the gravyNo method is given; a little flour-and-butter kneaded together is the usual period answer. Whisk in beurre manie off the boil and simmer two minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- The egg-and-milk enrichmentIf you use the yolk rather than cream, take the pan off the heat first and temper the yolk with a spoonful of hot sauce before it goes in. Returned to a boil it will curdle.
- Forcemeat-ballsSmall dumplings of minced veal or pork with breadcrumbs, suet and herbs, poached or fried separately. Optional, and easily replaced with a few good sausage meatballs.
- YieldThe recipe fixes no quantity; it depends entirely on how much roast veal came back from the table. The gravy takes an hour, so start the bones before you slice the meat.
"Collop" is an old English word for a slice of meat, attested in Middle English well before the fifteenth century, and long paired with bacon — a "collop" of bacon and eggs was a Shrove-tide dish, and Collop Monday still names the day before Shrove Tuesday in parts of England. Cassell's gives collops both as a fresh-meat dish and, as here, as a way of using up a cold joint, which is the more revealing version: a large Victorian household would likely have roasted big cuts, and the cook could be expected to build a second, sauced course out of what came back from the table, bones included. Veal was far commoner on British menus then than now, and its own bones and trimmings supplied exactly the gelatinous, mildly flavoured gravy the dish needs, so nothing left the kitchen unused. The lemon rind, mace and sherry are the standard Victorian seasoning grammar for pale meats, inherited more or less intact from eighteenth-century cookery.