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Veal, Minced, with Fowl
The white flesh of a boiled or roast fowl is very good mixed with minced veal. It should be seasoned and flavoured in the same way. A little lean ham is always an improvement to this dish.
This is a variation note rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you are already making Cassell's minced veal and tells you what to add. A few points on reading it correctly.
- Minced does not mean ground raw meatIn Victorian usage minced veal is cooked veal, left from a roast or a boiled joint, chopped small with a knife and warmed through in gravy or a white sauce. Starting with raw mince gives a completely different, and much greyer, dish.
- The hinge: never let it boilAlready-cooked veal and fowl reheated at a boil turn stringy and squeak against the teeth. Bring the sauce to the point of trembling, slip in the meat, and give it only long enough to heat through, three or four minutes.
- What "seasoned and flavoured in the same way" meansThe recipe leaves the seasoning to the minced veal recipe it points back to. Typical period seasonings for a white mince of veal are salt, white pepper or a pinch of cayenne, a blade of mace or a scrape of nutmeg, a strip of lemon peel taken out before serving, and a squeeze of lemon juice at the end; pale seasonings were preferred so as not to speck the white sauce.
- ProportionsNo quantities are given. A workable reading is roughly equal parts veal and white fowl meat, with the ham at about a tenth of the total weight - enough to season, not enough to dominate.
- The hamLean cooked ham, minced as fine as the meat. Boiled or baked ham is right; modern wet-cured deli ham is saltier and wetter, so hold back on salt until you have tasted.
- Sauce and bodyThe mince needs enough well-flavoured veal or chicken stock, thickened with a little roux or bound with cream and an egg yolk, to coat rather than swim. Off the heat when the yolk goes in, or it will curdle.
- Serving and yieldCommonly sent up within a border of mashed potato or rice, or with triangular sippets of fried bread set round the dish; poached eggs on top are sometimes seen with minces of this kind. As a rough guide, a pound of mixed meat with sauce serves three or four.
- Leftover handlingCooked meat that has been sitting about should have been cooled quickly and kept cold, and the finished mince should be brought to steaming hot right through. Reheat it once only.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the English mince, when a household that had roasted a joint on Sunday was expected to account for it respectably for two or three days afterwards, and cookery books carried whole runs of entries on minced beef, minced mutton, minced veal and their garnishes. Veal was the natural candidate for the delicate treatments - pale meat, mild flavour, a white sauce, lemon and mace rather than gravy and onion - and this short note simply extends the logic sideways: the breast of a boiled fowl is the same colour and much the same texture, so it can be stretched into the same dish, with a little ham to supply the salt and savour that neither meat has on its own. The trick of adding a small proportion of cured pork to bland white meat is far older than the book and runs through forcemeats, quenelles and potted meats alike. Entries of this kind, only three sentences long and dependent on the recipe above them, are characteristic of the dictionary format Cassell's adopted, where a cook was expected to read along the alphabetical run rather than treat each paragraph as self-contained.