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Veal Pudding, Baked
Take half a pound of cold roast veal, carefully freed from skin, fat, and gristle, and finely minced. Mix thoroughly with it a tea-spoonful of salt, a pinch of cayenne, a pinch of grated nutmeg, and the grated rind of half a lemon. Pour half a pint of nicely-flavoured boiling gravy (made by stewing the trimmings of the veal in water) over two ounces of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Let them all cool, then stir into it the minced veal, and add three well-beaten eggs. Whisk the mixture briskly for a minute or two, turn it into a well-buttered dish, and bake in a moderate oven. If liked, the crumbs may be soaked in cream instead of gravy. Time to bake the pudding, one hour. Probable cost, 10d., exclusive of the cold meat. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian way of using up the Sunday joint: minced cold veal bound with panada and egg, baked as a savoury pudding. The technique is sound and translates directly, but a few of the quantities need converting and one step is easy to rush.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F (180C, gas 4). An hour at that heat sets the custard through without curdling it; hotter and the eggs weep and the surface toughens before the centre firms.
- Imperial measuresCassell's half-pint is 10 fl oz, so about 1 1/4 US cups of gravy. Two ounces of fine dry crumbs is roughly half a cup; if you use fresh crumbs, weigh them, as a cup of fresh weighs well under half as much and the pudding will be loose.
- Let it cool before the eggsThis is the hinge. The crumbs are soaked in boiling gravy to make a panada, and if you beat in the three eggs while it is still hot you get scrambled egg suspended in breadcrumb. Cool to lukewarm at most.
- The gravy is part of the recipeThe book has you simmer the veal trimmings in water for the half-pint of gravy, though it gives no time; the longer and the more bone that goes in, the more body the stock will have. Veal is bland; a cube-and-water substitute will show. Unsalted chicken stock reduced a little is the nearest shop-bought stand-in.
- Mincing, not processing"Finely minced" means chopped by hand or put twice through a mincer, so the meat stays in distinct grains. A food processor turns cold cooked veal to paste in seconds and the pudding sets rubbery.
- Dish and donenessUse a buttered 1-quart dish, filled no more than three-quarters. It is done when a knife in the centre comes out clean and the pudding barely trembles; internally around 165F. A shallow tray of hot water in the oven keeps the edges from setting hard.
- SeasoningThe teaspoonful of salt is seasoning the whole mixture, not just the 8 oz of meat, so it is close to normal by modern habit; hold back a little only if the gravy has been reduced or salted, and taste the mixture before the eggs go in.
- ServingThree or four as written, and it wants something sharp alongside: a green salad, pickled walnuts, or the lemon-and-caper sauces the period served with veal. The cream version is richer and blander, so keep the lemon rind in either case.
Baked meat puddings of this kind sat at the practical end of the Victorian kitchen: a way of turning the tail end of a roast into a dish that could be sent to table in its own dish rather than reappearing as cold slices. The method is a panada then bound with egg, which is the same principle as a quenelle or a forcemeat, and it was taught in cookery books as a general technique to be applied to whatever cold meat was in the larder. The costing, "10d., exclusive of the cold meat", is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced almost every recipe so a household could compare dishes on the housekeeping book as well as on the plate. Veal was far commoner in British and Continental cooking of the 1870s onwards than it is now, and its mildness made it the standard meat for delicate invalid and nursery cookery, a category this pudding, lightly spiced and softly set, sits close to.