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Veal Rissoles, Gravy For
Put into a saucepan the veal bones broken up small, with the trimmings and any other bones that are to be had, together with a slice of fresh butter and a large onion finely minced. Shake the saucepan over the fire till the onion is lightly browned, then pour in as much thin flour and water as will barely cover the contents. Add a bunch of parsley, a blade of mace, an inch of lemon-rind, six or eight peppercorns, and a little sugar browning; cover the sauce-pan closely, and let its contents simmer gently until the stock is strong and pleasantly flavoured. Strain and cool it, then clear it from fat. Add a dessert-spoonful of ketchup, two table-spoonfuls of cream, and also a little pepper and salt. Let it boil up, and it will be ready for serving. Time, about an hour and a half to simmer the gravy.
A bone gravy built to accompany fried veal rissoles, thickened at the start rather than the end. Most of the work is unattended simmering; the decisions that matter are the browning and the ketchup.
- Brown the onion properlySome of the colour of the finished gravy comes from the onion and bones browning in butter before liquid goes in, though the recipe also adds sugar browning for colour. The instruction is only to take the onion to a light brown, so stop short of a dark colour.
- "Thin flour and water"A loose slurry, not a roux: flour whisked into cold water thinly enough to pour freely. The recipe gives no quantities, only that you should use just enough to barely cover the bones.
- Ketchup means mushroom or walnutIn a book of this date ketchup usually means the thin, dark, salty mushroom or walnut kind, closer to a spiced soy than to tomato sauce. Tomato ketchup will make the gravy sweet and sharp; mushroom ketchup, or failing that a little Worcestershire sauce or soy, is nearer the intent.
- Sugar browningCaramel colouring, once kept as a bottled household staple: sugar cooked black and let down with water. A few drops of gravy browning does the same job, or caramelise a teaspoon of sugar in the pan and deglaze it.
- Spoon sizesA dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons; a table-spoonful here is about half a modern fluid ounce, so two of cream is roughly 2 tablespoons. Add the cream cautiously and taste, as veal stock is delicate and easily flattened.
- A blade of maceOne curl of the dried aril from a nutmeg, not ground mace. If you only have ground, use a pinch and expect a slightly cloudier sauce; strain through muslin.
- Cooling to degreaseStraining and chilling lets the fat set into a cap you can lift off cleanly, which is worth the wait for a gravy served over fried rissoles. If pressed for time, blot the surface with kitchen paper or use a fat-separating jug.
- The final boil"Let it boil up" means bring it just to the boil to marry the cream and seasoning, then serve. Holding a cream-enriched gravy at a rolling boil will split it.
Veal was a mild meat generous with gelatine, which made its bones the preferred base for pale stocks and "white" sauces. Rissoles - minced cooked meat bound, shaped and fried - were a made dish for using up a joint, and a recipe like this is the other half of that economy, turning the bones and trimmings of the same animal into the sauce for its own leftovers. The instruction to thicken with flour and water at the outset rather than finishing with a roux or a reduction is characteristic of English household cookery of the period, as is the reliance on bottled ketchup and sugar browning, both of which sat in the store cupboard as ready-made shortcuts to savour and colour. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled at the end of the nineteenth century, arranged thousands of such entries alphabetically for a cook expected to have a carcass, a stockpot and an afternoon.