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VEAL, FRICASSEE OF (a German recipe)
This is a dish for spring-time. Cut up a breast of veal, stew it till tender in water flavoured with a little salt, bay-leaves, and a bunch of mixed herbs. Boil a dozen crayfish, pick out the meat, and set it aside; stew the shells, when pounded, in two ounces of butter, and strain them. Make the crayfish, with the exception of the tails, into balls with an equal quantity of bread-crumbs, two eggs, half the crayfish butter, and a little spice. Next boil some asparagus or cauliflower till tender. Make a sauce of two ounces of butter beaten to cream; to which add the yolks of two or three eggs beaten up, two spoonfuls of flour, the rest of the crayfish butter, and as much of the liquor in which the vegetables were boiled, or broth, as will make it a thin sauce. Now put the meat, the vegetables, and tails into the sauce, together with the balls; let all simmer for ten minutes; then take out the meat, boil the sauce a few minutes longer, and pour it over. Be careful to arrange the vegetables, fish, and balls with taste.
A white ragout in the old German manner, built from three separate cookings — the veal, the crayfish, the vegetables — that meet only in the last ten minutes. Read it through before starting; the order matters more than any single step.
- The hinge: the sauce holds egg yolksThe sauce carries flour as well as yolks, which gives it some protection, but once the beaten yolks are in it is safest not to let it boil hard. Take the recipe's "boil the sauce a few minutes longer" gently: hold it just below a simmer and stir until it coats the spoon.
- Breast of vealA bony, gelatinous cut that needs 1.5 to 2 hours of bare simmering to become tender. Boneless veal shoulder behaves much the same way in about 90 minutes. Keep the poaching liquid; the recipe's alternative of "broth" is well served by it.
- Crayfish, and what to do insteadA dozen whole crayfish yield only a few ounces of picked meat, most of it from the tails. Live crayfish are seasonal and regional; shell-on prawns or langoustines give the same tails and the same shells for the butter. Whichever you use, the shells must be pounded or crushed hard before going into the butter.
- Crayfish butterTwo ounces is 4 tablespoons. Warm the crushed shells gently in the butter for 15 to 20 minutes so the colour and flavour transfer, then strain through a fine sieve, pressing well. Do not let it brown. Half enriches the forcemeat balls, half finishes the sauce.
- The ballsEqual parts picked crayfish meat and fresh breadcrumbs bound with two eggs will be quite soft; add crumbs until the mixture just holds a shape. They are poached in the sauce, so keep them small — a heaped teaspoon each — and slide them in gently.
- "A little spice"The recipe does not say which. Mace or nutmeg with white pepper is the usual choice for a pale veal fricassee of this period; a blade of mace grated fine, or a quarter-teaspoon of ground, is about the right scale for this quantity.
- VegetablesAsparagus and cauliflower both want to stay firm; cook them separately and stop them short, since they get another ten minutes in the sauce. Reserve the cooking water — it is the thinning liquid the recipe calls for.
- YieldA breast of veal with the garnishes serves four to six. Serve it on a warm dish with plain boiled rice or small potatoes; the sauce is thin by design and wants something to sit on.
Cassell's files this under German cookery because Kalbsfrikassee — veal simmered pale, never browned, and finished with a yolk-and-butter liaison — was among the dishes English writers of the period associated with German tables, as were the crayfish that appear here. Freshwater crayfish were a genuine spring luxury across central and northern Europe, and the technique of pounding the shells into butter to draw out colour and flavour (Krebsbutter) appears in German and Austrian cookbooks of the nineteenth century, where it also flavoured soups and sauces for pike. The note that this is "a dish for spring-time" is not decorative: it marks the coincidence of the crayfish season with the first asparagus, and of both with young veal. Crayfish plague was spreading through European waters in the decades around the book's compilation, which is part of why the dish now reads as more exotic than it was.