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Veal, Kebobbed
Cut some lean veal into thin slices about an inch and a half in diameter, and not more than a quarter of an inch thick, and season each one of these with pepper, salt, powdered mace, and a little turmeric. Fasten them, alternately with thin slices of onion and slices of pickled pork, upon small skewers. Fry them in butter till they are sufficiently cooked, or fasten the skewers to a spit, and roast the meat before a clear fire, basting liberally during the process; drain them, and serve on a hot dish garnished with fried parsley. It liked, after the veal is fried it may be stewed in good curry gravy flavoured with lemon-juice, and served with dry rice.
A Victorian kebab: seasoned veal, onion and pickled pork threaded on small skewers and either pan-fried or spit-roasted. It works cleanly on a modern hob, provided the meat is cut thin enough to cook before the butter burns.
- Cut the veal properlyAn inch and a half across and a quarter inch thick is the hinge of the dish. Thicker pieces will still be raw at the centre when the onion and butter have blackened; the whole point of the thin round is that it cooks in a few minutes.
- Pickled porkThis was pork cured in brine, not smoked. Unsmoked streaky bacon or salt pork is the closest match; if you use ordinary smoked bacon, cut back the salt in the seasoning, and rinse salt pork before use.
- Mace and turmericMace is the outer covering of nutmeg, warmer and less resinous than the nut itself; ground nutmeg can stand in, used sparingly. The turmeric here is for colour and a faint earthiness rather than heat, so a scant quarter teaspoon per pound of veal is plenty.
- SkewersSmall metal skewers, six inches or so, hold four or five pieces each. Wooden skewers need a 30-minute soak and will still scorch in a frying pan; metal is the better choice for this method.
- Frying temperatureButter alone will brown before the pork fat renders. Use butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, or clarified butter, over medium heat, and turn the skewers every couple of minutes so all four faces colour. Veal is done at 145F/63C with a short rest.
- Roasting before the fireThe spit option assumes an open hearth with a dripping pan. Under a hot grill or broiler, six to eight inches from the element, turning and basting with melted butter, gives the nearest equivalent in eight to ten minutes.
- Fried parsleyWhole flat sprigs, thoroughly dry, dropped into 350F/175C fat for 20 to 30 seconds until they stop hissing. Wet parsley spits violently; pat it dry and stand back as it goes in.
- The curry finish"Good curry gravy" would typically have been a made curry sauce of the period, stock thickened with flour and butter and flavoured with curry powder. Simmer the fried skewers in it only long enough to heat through, five minutes at most, or the thin veal turns dry and stringy.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. Reckon on about 6 oz of veal per person, two skewers each, serving four from 1 1/2 lb of meat with a few ounces of pickled pork and two onions.
"Kebobbed" is the Victorian English rendering of kebab, and its arrival in a British household dictionary is one of many small traces of the Anglo-Indian kitchen in nineteenth-century cookery books. The turmeric and mace, the optional curry gravy, and the direction to serve with dry rice all point the same way: this is a British adaptation of a dish encountered through the East India Company and the Raj, adjusted to the meats and equipment of an English kitchen, which is why pork sits on the skewer alongside the veal. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, first issued in the 1870s and reprinted and revised for decades afterwards, was compiled as an alphabetical reference rather than a book to cook straight through, and it carries a long run of veal entries for what was then a much-used meat. The instruction to fasten skewers to a spit before a clear fire is a reminder of how recently the open hearth was the default; the frying-pan alternative, offered first, may hint at the growing presence of the closed range, though a single recipe can bear only so much weight.