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Veal Pie, Parsley
Cut some slices of lean veal into neat pieces, and season these with salt and cayenne. Take a handful of parsley, pick the leaves from the stems, scald them, press, dry, and chop them small. Fill the dish with layers of veal, and sprinkle a little parsley over each layer. Pour milk into the dish instead of stock. Cover the dish with pastry in the usual way, and bake until done enough. Lift up the crust, pour away the milk, and substitute for it half a pint of boiling cream. Serve immediately.
A plain baked veal pie whose whole point is the switch at the end: the milk that cooks with the meat is poured off and replaced with hot cream. Everything else is straightforward, but the original gives no quantities, no temperature and no time.
- The hinge: pour off, then pour inThe milk is a cooking medium, not the sauce. Under a long bake against seasoned veal it may well separate and taste flat, which is presumably why it is drained and boiling cream takes its place. The cream must be genuinely at a boil when it goes in, and the pie should go to table at once, before it soaks into the crust.
- Half a pint of creamAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, so about 1 1/4 US cups. Use heavy or whipping cream; single or light cream may split when boiled.
- "Bake until done enough"The original gives neither temperature nor time. A moderate oven, around 350F, and roughly 1 1/2 hours for a pie 2 inches deep is a reasonable modern reading. The pastry will likely colour well before the veal is tender, so cover the crust loosely with foil once it is browned.
- Scalding the parsleyThirty seconds in boiling water, then squeeze dry in a cloth and chop. This sets the colour and takes the raw edge off, so the parsley reads as a green seasoning through the meat rather than as herb specks on top.
- The vealLean shoulder or leg cut into thin slices roughly 2 inches square. Modern veal is often sold as scallopini or as thick chops; ask for shoulder, which has the connective tissue that gives the long bake something to work on.
- Cayenne, not pepperThe seasoning is salt and cayenne only, and it should be light -- a scant 1/4 teaspoon cayenne for 2 lb of veal. There is nothing else in the pie to hide behind.
- Getting the crust off in one pieceA shortcrust lid on a straight-sided dish lifts more cleanly than puff, which tears. Run a knife around the rim before lifting, and tip the dish over a bowl to drain rather than trying to spoon the milk out.
- Quantity and yieldAbout 2 lb of veal, a large handful of parsley and 1 1/2 cups of milk fills a 2-quart dish and serves four to five. The milk should come only about two-thirds up the meat; the veal releases juice as it cooks.
Cassell's arranges its material as a dictionary, so a single heading like Veal Pie spawns a run of variants -- among them this "parsley" version -- each a short note assuming the reader already knows how to line a dish and put a lid on it. The white version, milk or cream rather than brown stock and no browning of the meat, belongs to a nineteenth-century English idea of veal as a delicate meat that should be kept pale, the same thinking behind blanquettes and white fricassees. Draining a pie's cooking liquid and replacing it with something richer is the move the recipe calls for here.