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VEAL, MINCED, AND MACARONI (another way)
Soak and boil the macaroni as before. Mince and flavour the veal, and mix with it a table-spoonful of flour. Cleanse, peel, and slice three fresh truffles. Dissolve an ounce of butter in a saucepan, put in the truffles, and fry them gently for eight minutes. Pour over them half a pint of good gravy and the minced veal, and let them simmer as gently as possible for half an hour. Add a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice and two table-spoonfuls of sherry; turn the preparation into a mould lined with macaroni, and steam as in the last recipe.
This is a veal timbale: a buttered mould lined with lengths of macaroni, filled with a truffled mince, and steamed until it holds its shape. The recipe assumes you have already read the two entries above it in Cassell's, so the two references to "as before" need filling in.
- The veal is cooked vealThe veal is probably cooked veal -- mince dishes of this kind were often a way of using up the remains of a roast or braised joint, and the earlier Cassell's entries this one refers back to would settle it. Cooked meat, chopped fine, is the safer reading, with the simmer serving to flavour and bind. The recipe itself does not specify, and finely minced raw veal would cook through in half an hour.
- "Soak and boil the macaroni"Nineteenth-century macaroni was a long, thick, hard-dried tube that benefited from soaking before boiling. Modern dried pasta needs none. Use long macaroni or bucatini, boil it a minute short of al dente so it stays pliable enough to coil round the mould, and rinse it in cold water to stop it sticking to itself.
- MeasurementsAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. Half a pint of gravy is 10 fl oz in British measure, about 1¼ cups. A dessert-spoonful is roughly 2 teaspoons.
- "Good gravy"This means a reduced brown veal or beef stock with body enough to set lightly when cool, not thin broth and not a packet mix. The tablespoonful of flour worked into the mince is the only other thickening, and the filling must be thick enough to stay put when the mould is turned out.
- TrufflesThree fresh truffles is a greater extravagance now than it was for the book's audience, though truffles were never cheap. A few grams of fresh black truffle, shaved, gives the effect; preserved truffle peelings are the honest substitute. Sautéed chestnut mushrooms fill the space but do not pretend to the same flavour.
- Lining and steamingButter the mould generously, then coil the macaroni round the inside in a close spiral from the base up, so no filling can escape. Pack the mince in, cover the top with buttered paper and foil, and steam in a covered pan with water halfway up the mould for 45 minutes to an hour. Let it stand five minutes before turning out or it will slump.
- The sherry and lemon go in lastBoth are added after the half-hour simmer, so neither is subjected to the long cooking. Note, though, that the mixture is still steamed in the mould afterwards, and the recipe gives no reason for the order.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of veal; scale the mince to the mould you have. A moulded dish of this kind serves about four with a green vegetable.
Cassell's gives more than one version of veal and macaroni in succession -- this one is headed "another way" and refers back to "the last recipe" -- each a variation on the moulded, steamed dish known as a timbale, the word being that of a drum-shaped vessel. Dishes of this kind suited a kitchen where a joint was expected to reappear more than once: cold roast veal, which is bland and dry, is chopped, moistened with gravy, lifted with lemon and sherry, and dressed up in a macaroni case so that it arrives at table looking like an intentional dish rather than a remainder. Moulded entrées of this sort came into English cookery books from French practice. The truffles mark the ambition of the book's audience, and the truffled version is printed alongside plainer ones so the same mould could be served to family or to guests.