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VEAL, MINCED, WITH POTATOES (a plain family dish)
Take the remains of cold cooked veal. Free the lean part entirely from skin, bone, and fat, and mince it finely. Stew the bones and trimmings with as much cold water as will cover them, to a strong gravy. Mix with the minced veal an equal quantity (or more if liked) of cold boiled potatoes. Put the mixture into a saucepan, moisten with a little of the gravy, and add pepper and salt as required. Dredge a little flour into the mince, dissolve a slice of fresh butter in it, and let it simmer over a moderate fire till it is thoroughly hot. Stir occasionally to keep it from burning. Time, half an hour to heat the mince.
A leftovers dish that depends almost entirely on the gravy you build from the bones. Everything else is assembly.
- Make the stock firstThe bones and trimmings need a good while of gentle simmering to give anything worth calling "a strong gravy," and the recipe sets no time for it. Start this before you mince, or substitute good chicken or veal stock reduced by a third.
- Mince, not process"Mince it finely" means chopped by hand or run through a grinder. A food processor turns cooked veal to paste, which makes the finished dish pasty rather than textured.
- PotatoesCold boiled potatoes, diced small rather than mashed, hold their shape through the reheating. Freshly boiled hot potatoes will disintegrate.
- "A slice of fresh butter"Roughly 1 to 1 1/2 oz, about 2 to 3 tablespoons. "Fresh" here distinguishes it from salted butter, which was widely used for keeping; salted butter is fine if you ease off the added salt.
- Flour and moistureThe dredged flour and butter form a rough binder in the pan. Add gravy a little at a time -- the mixture should be moist and cohesive, not soupy, since it will not reduce much over a moderate heat.
- The half hourThirty minutes is longer than reheating requires. Twelve to fifteen minutes over low heat, stirring, brings it through without drying the veal into threads.
- Food safety on leftoversCold cooked veal should have been refrigerated promptly and used within two to three days, and the reheated mince taken to steaming hot throughout.
- YieldAbout 1 lb of trimmed cooked veal with an equal weight of potatoes serves four as a supper dish, with toast or a green vegetable.
Recipes like this one are the quiet engine of Victorian household cookery: the joint appeared roasted on Sunday, and the cook was expected to see it through several further meals without waste. The dish is presented as plain family cooking, and formulas beginning from "the remains" of a cold joint are a recurring pattern in cookery books of the period. Veal appears to have been more common on British and American tables then than now, partly because dairy farming produced surplus calves; the meat is lean and mild, which is why it is given the bone gravy and butter here rather than standing on its own. The mince-and-potato formula follows the same logic as shepherd's pie and hash -- chopped cooked meat, a starch to stretch it, and a little of its own liquor to bring it back together.