Home › The Principles of Cookery › Veal Pie, with Sausage
Veal Pie, with Sausage
Take from the fillet of veal some cutlets half an inch thick. Season these with pepper, salt, and powdered mace, and fill a dish with alternate layers of the cutlets and of thinly sliced Bologna sausage. The veal will yield sufficient gravy to moisten the pie. Cover with good pastry, and bake in the usual way. This pie is excellent eaten cold.
A plain covered pie of the sort Cassell's assumed every cook could assemble without being told times or temperatures. Two things need spelling out: what the sausage was, and how much liquid the meat really gives up.
- The hinge: liquidFillet of veal is very lean and may not, in a modern oven, throw off as much juice as the recipe promises. If in doubt, add about 150 ml (2/3 cup) of cold veal or light chicken stock before the lid goes on, poured down the side rather than over the meat.
- Bologna sausageIn a British book of this period this generally means a large cured sausage, often smoked, of the mortadella type, usually bought in slices cut from a whole sausage; period recipes vary in the meats used. American supermarket bologna is a different, blander product; mortadella or a mild coarse salami is closer.
- Fillet of vealThe Victorian butcher's fillet is the top round of the leg, not the tenderloin. Ask for veal leg or top round, sliced a good 1.5 cm (half an inch) thick as the recipe directs, then cut into pieces that will lie flat in the dish.
- "Bake in the usual way"The book gives no time or temperature. A workable modern equivalent for a covered pie of this size is about 425F (220C) for the first 20 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then about 325F (165C) for a further hour to hour and a quarter. The veal wants slow cooking; a fast oven throughout will leave it dry and shrunken.
- MacePowdered mace is the outer aril of the nutmeg and is still sold ground. Use it sparingly, about a quarter teaspoon for 1 kg of meat; it is warmer and more perfumed than nutmeg and dominates quickly.
- Pastry and venting"Good pastry" here is most likely a short crust made with butter or a butter and lard mix, rolled a little thicker than for a fruit pie so it holds the juices, though the recipe does not specify. Cut a vent in the centre and seal the rim firmly, or the filling boils out at the edge.
- Eating it coldThe cold pie is better if the liquid sets. Use a well-reduced veal stock, or add 5 g of leaf gelatine dissolved in a little warm stock and poured through the vent once the pie is out of the oven and beginning to cool.
- YieldAbout 1 kg of veal and 200 g of sausage in a 1.5 litre pie dish serves six, hot with potatoes or cold with pickles and salad. Cool completely before slicing if serving cold, ideally overnight in the refrigerator.
Cold meat pies of this kind were a fixture of the Victorian sideboard, the supper table and the picnic hamper, and veal, being mild and pale, was thought to need help from something salty and aromatic. The Bologna sausage supplies that help: the name attached itself loosely to any large smoked sausage of that type, much as "Bologna" later drifted in America to mean something quite different. The reliance on the meat's own gravy rather than a made sauce marks this as a household rather than a restaurant recipe, and the closing note that it is excellent cold is the practical point of the whole thing in a period when a baked pie left in the larder was the standard answer to the next day's cold luncheon.