Home › The Principles of Cookery › VEAL OLIVES (another way) (Prepare the olives)
VEAL OLIVES (another way) (Prepare the olives)
Prepare the olives in the usual way. Brown them in a little fat, drain them, pack them in a saucepan, and stew them in gravy till tender. A few minutes before serving put with them half a pint of stewed button mushrooms, a table-spoonful of lemon pickle or lemon-juice, and a glassful of Marsala. A dozen fried oysters may be added if liked.
A short finishing method rather than a full recipe: Cassell's assumes you already know how to make veal olives, and supplies only the sauce. Here is what the shorthand covers.
- "Prepare the olives in the usual way"An olive is a thin slice of veal — cut from the leg, or a flattened escalope — spread with veal or sausage forcemeat, rolled up and tied with string or fixed with a skewer. The recipe assumes the reader knows the sizes and gives none.
- The hinge: brown, then barely simmerColour the rolls hard in fat, then stew them at the merest tremble. Rolled veal boiled hard tightens, squeezes out its stuffing and turns dry. The recipe says only "till tender", which for rolls of this kind is likely to mean the better part of an hour at a bare simmer.
- "Gravy"In Victorian usage this generally means a rich meat stock rather than a thickened pan gravy. A good veal or beef stock; the recipe gives no quantity, only that the packed rolls are stewed in it till tender.
- Half a pint of mushroomsAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, so about 1 1/4 US cups of small button mushrooms already stewed in butter and a little stock. Add them at the end so they do not collapse.
- A glassful of MarsalaA wine glass of the period is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 fl oz, about 1/4 cup. Add it a few minutes before serving and let it cook through briefly to lose the raw spirit edge.
- Lemon pickleA once-standard bottled condiment of lemons salted and spiced with mace, nutmeg and cayenne, used as a sharp seasoning in made dishes. The English form is no longer generally sold; the recipe's own alternative, a tablespoon of lemon juice, is the practical substitute.
- The oystersIf you add them, fry them for well under a minute and drop them in at the very last moment. Held in hot sauce they toughen quickly.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. The quantities named — half a pint of mushrooms, a dozen oysters — suggest a dish for something like four to six.
A "veal olive" has nothing to do with the fruit; the word is generally traced to the older English alow or aloes, from French alouette, lark — small stuffed rolls of meat thought to resemble trussed little birds, an idea preserved in the French alouettes sans tête. Cassell's places this among the veal entries as a second method; what the book is really selling is the garnish, and that garnish tells you the period. Button mushrooms, a fortified Sicilian wine, bottled lemon pickle and optional fried oysters make up the standard grammar of a nineteenth-century brown ragoût.