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Veal, Minced, with Poached Eggs
Cut the lean meat from the bones, and mince it finely with a small portion of lean ham, if it is to be had. Break up the bones, and stew them in as much water as will cover them, with a carrot, an onion stuck with two cloves, three or four outer sticks of celery, a bunch of sweet herbs, and a little pepper and salt. Simmer the gravy for an hour or more, strain, skim it, thicken with white thickening or with flour and butter kneaded together, and add a little milk or cream. Stir the sauce over the fire till it is smooth and thick, pour half of it into another saucepan, and add the minced veal to the remainder. Let it remain on the fire till the veal is thoroughly hot. It must not boil or the meat will be hard; care must be taken, too, to keep it from burning. Pile the mince in the centre of a dish, lay poached eggs upon it, and garnish it round with small rolls of thin fried bacon. Pour over the mince a little of the sauce which was kept aside, and send the rest to table in a tureen. Time, one hour and a half to stew the gravy.
A Victorian way of turning the remains of a roast joint into a hot supper dish. The recipe assumes cooked veal from the day before and gives almost no quantities, so the proportions below are the ones that make it work.
- Start with cooked veal"Cut the lean meat from the bones" means a cold roast or braised joint; the mince is only reheated in the sauce, never cooked from raw. If you begin with raw veal mince, brown and cook it through separately before the sauce goes near it.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerThe instruction not to let it boil is the whole dish. Already-cooked veal boiled in sauce tightens and dries. Hold the pan at a bare shiver, well below a simmer, just until the meat is hot through.
- White thickeningA period term for a pale roux, butter and flour cooked together without colour; the recipe offers flour and butter kneaded together raw (beurre manie) as a separate alternative, not the same thing. For about a pint of strained stock, roughly 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour will serve, then loosen with 3-4 tablespoons of milk or cream.
- Sweet herbs and the clouted onion"A bunch of sweet herbs" is a bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme, a bay leaf. The onion stuck with two cloves goes in whole and is discarded with the bones.
- The stockAn hour and a half of simmering veal bones gives a light, gelatinous broth rather than a deep brown one; keep it at a slow simmer and skim, or it will cloud. The recipe says only to cover the bones with water; you need about a pint of finished sauce, so reduce or top up as the pot demands.
- Rolls of thin fried baconStreaky bacon cut very thin, rolled and secured with a cocktail stick; the recipe fries them, though a hot oven will also crisp them.
- Poached eggsPoach them last, in barely trembling water, and drain them well on a cloth; a wet egg slides off the mound of mince and thins the sauce beneath it.
- Quantities and yieldThe original gives none. Figure on 1 lb of cooked lean veal, 2 oz lean ham and a pint of sauce, half of it stirred through the meat and half served separately. That feeds four, with one egg each.
Cassell's belongs to a generation of household books written for kitchens that produced large roast joints and were then obliged to account for every scrap of them; dishes of minced veal appear in many nineteenth-century English cookery books. Veal suited such treatment: its mild flavour and pale colour went with the white sauces common in genteel English cooking, and a cold veal joint dries out badly when simply sliced. Adding poached eggs and bacon rolls turns a reheated remnant into something presentable enough for a breakfast or luncheon table. The instruction to stew the bones for the gravy reflects a household where nothing arrived pre-made and where the bones of the roast were the second half of the dish.