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Veal, Supreme Of
Take from a fillet of veal nine or ten slices, about three inches long and an inch and a half wide. Put them on a buttered tin, sprinkle them with lemon-juice and a spoonful of white wine, then pour a gill of white veal stock over, and cook, covered, in a gentle oven for five minutes. Then put a pinch of salt and pepper on each fillet, and cook for a few minutes more. Make a chaudfroid sauce of a gill of thick bechamel, a gill of aspic, and half a gill of cream; boiled together until reduced to one-half. Let this sauce get cold; divide it into two, and colour one portion green and the other pink. Mask the slices of veal alternately with the green and pink sauce, and dish them up on a border of aspic, putting some finely-chopped aspic between the fillets where they overlap. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. to 3s.
A cold buffet piece rather than a dinner-plate dish: thin veal escalopes gently poached in the oven, chilled, then masked with a setting sauce. The hinge is the temperature of the chaudfroid when you coat — everything else is straightforward.
- Coat the sauce at the right momentChaudfroid must be cooled to the point where it just coats the back of a spoon and shows the first sign of setting. Too warm and it runs off the veal in streaks; too cool and it goes on in lumps that will not level. Keep the bowl over tepid water and stir often, and have the veal cold and dry before you start.
- A gillFive fluid ounces in imperial measure, so a generous half cup. The finished sauce is a gill of bechamel plus a gill of aspic plus half a gill of cream, reduced by half — about 6 fl oz of coating sauce, enough for ten small slices with a little waste.
- A gentle ovenAround 300-325F. The slices are thin and sitting in liquid, so they poach rather than roast. Total cooking is under ten minutes; check that the veal has firmed and lost its pink at the centre before taking it out, then let it cool in its own liquor so it does not dry.
- Fillet of vealThe cushion or top round, cut into escalopes and trimmed to the stated 3 x 1.5 inches. Ask for slices about a quarter-inch thick. Turkey breast cut the same way behaves almost identically if veal is hard to find, though the flavour is blander.
- The two coloursGreen in a Victorian kitchen came from spinach greening — spinach leaves pounded, the juice heated until the colour coagulates, then strained. Pink came from cochineal or a little beetroot juice. Both still work; use them a drop at a time, as the sauce should read pastel, not painted.
- AspicThe recipe assumes a well-clarified veal or chicken jelly firm enough to slice, which means a stock made with a calf's foot or reinforced with leaf gelatine. It does three jobs here: it thins and glosses the sauce, it forms the border, and chopped fine it fills the gaps between the overlapping slices.
- Keep it coldOnce masked, the dish lives in the refrigerator until it goes to table. Aspic and chaudfroid both soften in a warm room, and a warm buffet will slump the arrangement.
- Yield and costNine or ten slices serves four or five as a cold course. The 2s. 6d. to 3s. is the book's own probable-cost estimate for the dish.
Supreme in nineteenth-century kitchen French meant the choicest cut, most often the breast fillet of a bird, and by extension any prime slice presented in its best form; here it is borrowed for veal escalopes. The chaudfroid — literally hot-cold, a sauce made hot and served cold — is generally traced in cookbook lore to a French household of the late eighteenth century whose cook served a fricassee that had gone cold and found it improved, though the story is traditional rather than documented. Chaudfroid work in two or three tinted sauces was a familiar part of cold-table cookery by the time Cassell's was compiled: ball suppers, wedding breakfasts and elaborate buffets. The technique rewards presentation over flavour, and mastering aspic and a coating sauce unlocked a whole class of showpiece dishes from the same two preparations.